


Swear To Tell

by strix_alba



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternative Sexuality, Catholic Character, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Relationship Negotiation, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-22
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-17 14:33:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 37,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4670216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strix_alba/pseuds/strix_alba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the year after Wilson Fisk is apprehended, Matt Murdock fights crime; gets drunk in the name of friendship; kisses his employee (once); kisses his business partner (twice); loses a court case; falls in love; and spends a lot of time at church.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fall and Winter

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this since a week after I finished watching the series, and having a total blast. It's ended up with more complicated emotions than I originally planned, but is still basically a happy fluffy shipfic written the way that my id prefers shipfic to be written: lots of casual touching, no masturbation or sex scenes, and inclusive of outside relationships and activities.
> 
> Some violence and Catholicism. (More of the latter than the former. I had a lot of fun writing a Catholic POV character. If there's any religious stuff in here that you don't get, feel free to ask.)

“So … Fisk is awaiting trial, the yakuza are gone, the Russians are gone, United Allied is dissolved, and the Triad pulled their heroin out of the city. Am I leaving anyone out?” Foggy asks, eight days after it all goes down.

“Sounds about right. Except for the Japanese. They’re still pissed, probably looking for a way back in,” Matt corrects him. “They just haven’t found it yet.”

“But basically, all of your enemies are out of the way.” Foggy thumps his head against the back of Matt’s couch. “Ugh, that sounds so badass. Forget I said that. All of Fisk’s people are out or caught.”

Matt hums under his breath. “There will always be more scum to take their place.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re not going to stop,” says Foggy. 

The couch cushions shift, and Matt has plenty of time to react but he lets Foggy flick him just to the side of a knife wound that they both know is still healing. “I can’t,” he says.

“I know, I get it,” Foggy says, sigh whistling over the mouth of his beer bottle. “No, that’s a lie. I don’t get it, but I get that if I want you then I have to be okay with _him_ too.”

“You make it sound like Daredevil is your boyfriend’s asshole best friend,” Matt says, trying out a smile.

“Which I kind of feel like he is,” says Foggy, “but that’s not the point! The point is that you don’t have any excuse not to tell Karen now.”

“Excuse me?”

“She deserves to know. Maybe even more than me,” he adds grudgingly, in the direction of the floor rather than to Matt himself. 

Matt peels himself off the couch so that he can turn to face Foggy, pulling his legs underneath him and his elbow up on the back of the couch without moving fast enough to pull any stitches. He shakes his head. “It’s bad enough that you know. They’ll k— the Russians? They found out that Claire was helping me, and they, um. They took her.” He arrived and he saw: the oxidization of her blood on the cold metal surface of the baseball bat; her sweat where it met the chemical bonds in the duct tape strangling her skin; and the echoing footsteps of men built larger and more deadly than her, surrounding her, solid constructs of ill-intent that filled him with fury.

“Matt?” Foggy prods him in the shoulder. 

He grinds the heel of his hand into his forehead. Claire is safe. The Russians are gone. “I don’t want that to happen to anyone. I especially don’t want it to happen to either of you.”

“That is one thing we can agree on. I also don’t want to be kidnapped,” says Foggy, with a flourishing gesture in Matt’s direction. “But come on, man. Karen was the one who got framed for murder, and then decided to go up against the multi-billion-dollar corporation that framed her. She’s tough enough to decide for herself whether she wants to stick around for your crazy stupid heroics.” 

It’s the most positive thing that he’s said about Matt’s other life so far. “Foggy, I’m trying, but,”—

“And I don’t like lying to her. She deserves better.”

Matt tucks his elbows in and squashes himself further into the couch cushions. “I’ll think about it.”

  


~~*~~*~~

  


Matt waits another week and a half before he leans in to Foggy on the walk between Chifa Wok and Foggy’s subway stop and says, “Do you have plans Saturday night?”

“Marci,” says Foggy, and Matt smirks like he’s completely pleased that his best friend is sort-of seeing his ex again, instead of mostly pleased and a tiny bit jealous. “Why? What’s up?”

“If Karen reacts as well as you did to finding out about me…” He shrugs uncomfortably.

“Then I will blue-ball myself for her sake,” Foggy assures him. “I won’t let Karen freak out alone about her other boss being a hypocritical dick. And Marci will probably never let me darken her doorway again. That’s how much I care about you guys.”

Matt tightens his grip on Foggy’s elbow, giving his arm an awkward half-hug. “You’re a hero,” he says, an attempt to lighten the mood that falls just short of its mark. 

Foggy pats his hand. “Don’t I know it.”

  


~~*~~*~~

  


Foggy leaves the office the next day with a loud, unnecessary comment about going to watch baseball (even though the season ended two weeks ago) with Stumacher and Price’s hottest new corporate attorney, and that they should enjoy their weekend. He squeezes Matt’s shoulder on his way out, presumably as a show of moral support. It mostly has the effect of transferring just enough harsh chemical smell of cheap soap from his hand onto Matt’s jacket to be annoying. Matt clasps his wrist in return.

He waits until the clock on the wall has ticked its way around another four minutes before he breaks the quiet of the office. “Karen?” He turns his head in her general direction, until the rhythm of papers being sorted slows and he has her attention. “Are you free tomorrow night?”

“Um.” She pauses with a drawer still open. “Yes, why?” she asks.

“Do you remember when I got hit by a car?”

“Of course. It wasn’t that long ago.” She doesn’t elaborate, lets the unspoken _whatever it really was_ hang in the air.

“I’d like to talk about it, if you want — if that’s okay with you.”

Karen shuffles her papers together more quickly, rushing to pack them up without crumpling anything important. “Depends. Are we still going to talk about it like it was a car accident, or are you going to tell me what really happened?”

He laughs bitterly, ducks his head and clicks his cane against the floor. “That second one. Can I pick you up at your apartment?” She flushes, an uncomfortable rush of blood to her extremities and the surface of her skin that has him backtracking before she can utter more than a confused choked-off noise at the back of her throat. “I realize how that sounds, but I’m not asking you on a date, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He adds a disarming huff of laughter.

She swallows, and he can hear the rasp of hair on skin as she presumably tucks her hair behind her ear. “Oh, thank god. I don’t think — not that you’re. Oh. Yeah, I guess you can. Are you going to tell me where we’re going on this not-date?”

He cocks his head. “That depends. How about we decide when I get there?”

Karen is still too-warm and flushed with adrenaline, but she makes a sharp movement and then says, “Sorry — I nodded. How about eight o’clock?”

He smiles. “Perfect.”

  


~~*~~*~~

  


Matt binned most of his old uniforms a month and a half ago, and now that he has the option of not being stabbed as frequently, he doesn’t want to go back, but he locates a few incomplete sets of black clothing around the house, and after he’s washed the mask thoroughly (it had been under the bed and smelled, among a myriad of other unpleasant things, like dust and feet and mouse droppings; and he loves Karen more than almost anyone else but Matt’s not going to subject himself to that if he can help it) he ties the mask over his face and heads for the rooftops.

It’s a little past eight when he gets to her apartment building, and she’s pacing, wandering aimlessly around her apartment. He drops over the rooftop edge and down onto the fire escape. He climbs down the side, rather than taking the stairs: in a few apartments, there are people near the windows, even someone with the window cracked halfway open because they live near the boiler room so their apartment is stuffy even well into October.

When he reaches Karen’s window, he swings over the edge of the railing onto the landing and knocks on the window before he can think too much about what a stupid, dangerous idea this is. She breathes in sharply, accompanied by a halo of heat and sweat and assorted fear chemicals that he can feel through the walls. He jumps back onto the opposite railing, giving her enough space that when she opens the curtain, they won’t be directly face to face.

She approaches the window, pauses, and then yanks on the blinds so sharply that the anchors in the drywall groan along with the _zip_ of the shutters collapsing together. She jumps, a shout of surprise muffled by a physical object — she covers her mouth. Matt waves to her and slowly, slowly unfolds himself from his perch on the railing and steps onto the landing. He smells pepper spray in a plastic aerosol bottle, and is careful to make his movements as obvious as possible.

“May I come in?” he asks through the glass. There’s a crack between the upper and lower panes of the window where the insulation has started to pull away; he can feel a whisper of heat from inside the house escaping, so she should be able to hear him all right.

There’s a long pause in which Matt briefly wonders if he’s made a mistake — this isn’t Karen, or it is but she’s changed her mind about Daredevil…

The window creaks open, he shakes himself, and Karen steps to the side, pepper spray still held at chest height. “What’s happening?” she asks. “What do you need?” She brushes past him to slam the window shut, locking it twice and yanking the blinds down with as much force as she had hauled them up. She needs to stop doing that, or they’re going to break in a month or so, Matt thinks, but he doesn’t say it because she is still afraid and he really, really doesn’t like pepper spray.

“Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to talk to you,” he tells her, hands up. “I owe it to you.”

Heat rises in her cheeks. “Okay.” Her voice is higher than normal, strained, and she’s breathing too fast. Matt tilts his head. Not quite fear… hysteria, maybe. Possibly attraction. “I have a friend coming over in a — well, he should have been here by now, but it’s rush hour. Oh, but he said you’ve met, it’s okay.”

She’s trying so hard to remain calm, forcing herself to breathe normally and opening and closing her free hand into a fist. Her voice is directed all over the place: she isn’t looking at him, she’s looking into corners, like she’s trying to find somewhere for him to hide. Matt is surprised by the warmth that floods through him from his chest outwards, and gives her a small smile. “Can we sit down somewhere?”

“Yes,” she says, heartbeat still too quick. She clenches her fingers around her pepper spray and her hands are still sweating as she leads him to the kitchen table. He uses the scrape of chair legs on linoleum and the direction that she slides into her seat to find his own without hesitating. 

The spine of the chair digs into the wounds still closing on his back. The water in sink tap burbles and doesn’t go anywhere. Karen’s neighbors next door try to tune their radio with a broken antenna. Upstairs, someone plays a video game.

Matt fidgets. Karen leans forwards, table creaking slightly with the transfer of weight. “Hey. I’m on your side. What is it?”

He wishes that he had rehearsed this — rehearsed it more, with different scenarios, maybe. “I’ve been lying, and I’m sorry…” he sighs, and slides his fingertips under the edges of the mask to press against his temples, then to pull off the black fabric and bunch it tightly in his fist.

Karen goes still. Matt registers the faint sour taste of nausea on her breath, bile low in her throat, stuttering breaths as she faces him. “What the fuck?” she says, and, “ _Matt_?”

“I’m so sorry,” he repeats.

She scrubs her face with both of her hands, over and over, heart racing. He reaches out to touch her shoulder. She jerks away. “No,” she says, and even without any enhanced senses, it would be easy to hear the incipient tears in her voice. “No, you don’t get to do that.” She stands up, steps behind her chair — like it would make a difference if he wanted to reach her, Matt thinks, and is sickened by himself. He rests his hands in his lap, leaves the mask on the table, faces the wall across the room.

“May I say something?” he asks her.

“What’s to say?” she asks. “’Sorry I’ve been lying to you the entire time I’ve known you’? Don’t bullshit me.”

He twists his lips into a smile and hopes like hell that she understands he’s being sincere. “I won’t. I promise. Only the truth.”

“Sure.”

“Karen. I’m not — I’m not sorry that I didn’t tell you before. I’ve been lying about this my whole life. I’m sorry that it’s hurting you, right now.”

“Okay…” Her voice is a little steadier, although she’s wound tightly around herself, still sounds and smells and feels like she’s an inch from spraying him with pepper and running. He supposes it’s the best that he can ask for, under the circumstances. 

“I don’t expect you to care, or to trust me after this. I don’t even expect you to believe me. I’d — I’d like it if you did, but I know I don’t deserve it.” He breathes in, and tastes salt in the air: she’s crying, which somehow hurts worse than anger. “I just wanted you to know that I was afraid, if you found out, that it would make it easier for them to track me; or that Fisk would use you to get to me, and if I didn’t find you in time, I don’t think I could…” 

He trails off, because now Karen is laughing, tears still rolling down her cheeks and uneven hysterical laughter coming out of her mouth: too loud against the low background hum of the city, too sharp and broken to fill the room the way that it should. 

“Can I get you some water?” he asks, even though he wants to touch her and make sure that her lungs, her heart are going to keep working properly.

“No, Matt, you cannot _get me some water_ ,” Karen says. “You can tell me how the hell you managed to save my life when you can’t even — you’re blind.” She hiccups and starts laughing again, wild. “I’m sorry, but what the hell, you _asshole._ ”

If he wasn’t already on shaky grounds, Matt would point out that there are plenty of situations he can think of in which a blind person could save her life without superpowers. He explains himself, as simply as he knows how, starting with the assurance that he really is blind, but he’s got a much safer costume now. 

Her breathing becomes more regular as he talks. He gets to the end, the part where he tracked down Detective Hoffman, and still hasn’t figured out yet if her stillness is because she’s calmed down, or because she is about to get very angry.

She swallows hard. The tendons and ligaments in her hands stretch, and her nails press into the skin of her palms. “There’s wine in the fridge,” she says. The cold, sharp edges in her voice that he first noticed two weeks ago are back, overriding the watery notes of hysteria. “Is that something you can do? Find a bottle of wine in a stranger’s fridge?”

“It’s in my repertoire, yes.”

She sucks in a slow breath. “Go get it.”

Her whole refrigerator is layered with the traces of various wines and beers, most of which are under a month old; right now, though, there is only one bottle. She yanks out the cork and drinks without bothering to pour herself a glass. Matt leans against the counter behind her.

“You’ve been drinking a lot lately.”

“No, I had a lot of alcohol in my fridge lately. I threw it out. Wasn’t a good idea. Didn’t want to end up like.” She tosses back another mouthful of wine. “Never mind.”

Matt sniffs. “I’m sorry.”

Karen drinks what sounds like half the bottle before she finally lets go of the neck. “I tried not to involve you, either,” she says. “I thought, maybe, if I kept it between me, and Ben, and the masked man, then you and Foggy wouldn’t get hurt. Three guesses how that went.”

Matt tries to wet his lips so they don’t crack when he speaks. “We ended up involved anyway,” he says.

Karen rises to her feet. Anger, acrid-smelling and hot, fills her from the top down, mingling with the wine and fresh tears. “They threatened to kill you,” she says, slowly and with great deliberation, and cold shivers its way down his back. _They_. “They threatened to kill you and Ben and Foggy and everyone else I cared about before they would let me die. I know how that feels. I can’t not know.” 

She drops the bottle down on the table. “I understand why you didn’t tell me. It blows. And I want to yell at you, but I’m so tired of being angry,” she says, voice cracking. She steps forwards; when he reaches for her this time, she lets him pull her against his chest and wrap his arms around her. She presses her face into his shoulder, fists trapped between them, and starts to cry in earnest. Matt hugs her tighter, willing his hands to stop shaking. They’re the same height, but her frame is lighter, shaped by a lifetime of desk jobs and yoga instead of martial arts. The thought that someone tried to threaten Karen Page — tried to lever his life against her compliance — floods him with adrenaline, but the threat is gone. He can only listen to her let go of whatever is trapped inside her, feel her breath near his skin and her pulse racing to match his. “Neither of us are alone,” he says softly. “Not anymore.”

Karen’s voice is muffled and hoarse when she finally speaks. “I thought my world was bigger. I liked knowing that there was someone else out there besides us who cared that much.”

He nods, knows that she can feel it against her hair. “I’m sorry.”

Karen huffs and shoves her head against him. “Screw you, Matt Murdock,” she says, but she pries free her arms and wraps them around his shoulders. It’s enough to go on, for now.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


Matt isn’t sure what’s going to happen at work the next day; he goes in bracing himself for the worst, for awkwardness, or for Karen to have woken up and decided that she has enough energy left to be angry, after all.

When he gets to the office, Foggy is on the phone, using his Professional Voice at someone getting defensive over her company’s inability to release the records to which he insists he is legally entitled. Karen is at her desk, still and apparently focused on the computer slowly overheating in front of her. Matt eases the office door shut to avoid disturbing them.

“Morning,” Karen murmurs, so quietly that Matt isn’t sure whether she means for him to hear it or not. He frowns at her. “Don’t want to interrupt him,” she explains in the same quiet tone. “I had a couple of questions about our insurance plan. I’ve been comparing it to some others but I wasn’t sure if you two had specific reasons for the one you’d picked…”

“Oh. Um.” Matt makes a gesture in the direction of his own office. Karen gets up and joins him. “We just kind of picked something that had dental and hoped for the best, honestly,” he says, as she closes the door to his office.

“I figured,” she says. “Want me to give you the short version?”

 _That’s it?_ he wants to ask. It’s so mundane — terrifying, in its own way, but fundamentally ordinary — that it’s almost a letdown. “Sure,” he says.

Foggy knocks on the door partway through Karen’s rundown of small business insurance options, which all sound mostly the same (and it’s not like he’s ever gone to the hospital, anyway), and Matt breaks away with relief.

“You two good?” asks Foggy.

Karen’s hand brushes his over one of her printouts. “Yeah.”

Foggy pauses, evaluating them for a moment (Matt can’t read this from any one thing in particular, he just knows because it’s Foggy). “Okay, so can we agree that the horns on his uniform are kind of hokey? Help me convince him to ditch them, I need an ally on this.”

Matt smiles.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


Foggy nags him about bruises, now, even though Matt can tell that broaching the subject still makes him uncomfortable. “It looks like someone gave you a hickey, man, you can’t walk into court like that,” he says, gently touching the fingerprints on Matt’s neck. “Be more careful.” 

He sounds sad and disappointed that Matt isn’t taking better care of himself, like the number of times he’s crawled into Claire’s dumpster to bleed in safety hasn’t significantly decreased since he’s started wearing Melvin Potter’s armor, like he hasn’t taken a hundred or so beatings worse than this one before. Matt raises his eyebrows. “Maybe someone did give me a hickey.”

Foggy removes his hand. “Wait, did you actually get that girl from the bar last night?”

“Nope.”

There’s a pause. Foggy shoves his hands into his pockets. “Did you ever?” he asks, suddenly unsure. “All those times I thought you were holding out on me.”

If Matt could see, he’d be able to tell if Karen is watching them or her computer monitor; and then he could figure out whether now is the time to tell Foggy the whole truth. “I never lied about it being violent,” he suggests. “I just … didn’t mention what kind of violent.”

“I don’t know if that’s creepy or kinky.”

Matt shrugs. _I’d rather fight scum than have sex,_ he wants to say, and a complicated feeling, frustration and want and the wonderful simplicity of a well-matched brawl, threatens to choke him; but it is neither the time nor the place to try to communicate it to Foggy. “Probably both,” he says.

“Hey guys,” Karen interrupts from behind her computer. “Did you know that Aeroflex has an office in Chelsea?”

“No they don’t,” Foggy says immediately. “They shouldn’t. Do they?”

“Look at this.”

Foggy joins her behind her desk and starts reading the opening titles of the company’s incorporation documents aloud to Matt. Matt touches the scrapes from a desperate attempt to strangle him barehanded the night before, chastising himself for not covering them before he left home this morning. _Pray in the innermost goddamn room,_ he reminds himself, forgets to pay attention to the middle of what Foggy is reading, and listens to him complain without heat about how he should just make Matt use the goddamn screen reader if he’s not going to bask in the glorious oaken tones of Foggy’s voice.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


There’s too much that is dark in the streets some weeks, harsh words and too much adrenaline and anger singing from the alleys; it seeps into Matt’s body and scrapes across his skin like so many cloth-wrapped knuckles, just asking to be beaten back and beaten down. He makes it home without losing his cool, and that’s long enough. He forgoes a real dinner in favor of pulling on his gloves, his uniform, and stretching before he heads for the roof. The devil is pushing against his skin from the inside out, but as he reaches for the window, he makes himself pause. He goes back for his cell phone, the one that isn’t a burner, and dials.

“Hey, buddy. What’s up?” asks Foggy, cheerful and incongruous.

Matt hesitates. “I’m going out,” he says. “Nothing in particular. I’ll probably be back in a few hours.”

“Are you okay?” Foggy asks, and Matt becomes aware that his voice has dropped: he’s used to letting go of the pleasantries and professional polish once he’s in the mask. He doesn’t talk like that to Foggy if he can help it; it makes him feel strangely exposed.

“Yeah,” he says, clearing his throat to dispel the gravelly notes. “Yeah, I thought, in case I don’t answer when you want to tell me about how drunk you are…”

“So I can be more specific when I’m worrying about what sort of trouble you’re getting yourself into?” Foggy says.

“You could just not worry,” Matt suggests.

“Or you could come throw darts with me and One-Eyed Joe, who — for the record — has _incredible_ aim for a guy with no depth perception. I could use someone to make me look like less of a schmuck.”

Matt can feel the tightly-coiled anger in his muscles starting to unwind, the longer he listens to Foggy speak. He could take off the mask and put away his escrima sticks and go down to Josie’s bar. But even pretending to be too blind to hit a dartboard with Foggy, as much as Matt loves him, would just be a stop-gap. He’d go off the next night anyway.

“Not tonight,” he says, and as a compromise, “I’ll let you know when I get back.”

“Don’t get yourself killed,” says Foggy, just a little too sincere.

“Well, since you asked so nicely…”

Foggy makes a huffing noise into the phone. “Hey, Matt,” he says.

“Still here.” Pacing, waiting to get outside and into the guts of the city, but still here.

“Thanks for calling.”

That, right there — if they were face to face, Matt would be hard-pressed not to hug him, the sort of full-body obnoxious tackle that he can usually only get away with after three or four consecutive shots. “Don’t gamble away the firm, Nelson,” he says, grinning, and hangs up.

 _Now_ he can get to work.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


“Morning,” says Matt. “How was darts?”

Foggy takes him by the arm and leads him around the office, guiding his hand to the pebbly plastic surfaces of the various machines, to the mini fridge, the desks, the chairs, and the Karen sitting in one of the chairs. “You’ll notice that all of the furniture is here,” he says, like he’s giving a tour of an old mansion with thick moldy air instead of a midsized Manhattan office. Heart beating a little too fast, he adds, “How was Fight Club?”

Matt smiles. “No new stitches.”

“How much paperwork is Captain Mahoney going to have to fill out today?”

Matt considers the least incriminating answer that he can reasonably give without lying. Apparently he takes too long. “You should see the look he’s giving you, Matt,” says Karen.

“Like he’s tired of putting up with my shit?” Matt guesses.

“I’m trying to decide whether I should be proud of you or not. You know, like Katrina’s geriatric dog trying not to pee on the rug,” says Foggy, exasperation and fondness warring in his voice. “She was Matt’s almost-girlfriend our second year of law school,” he explains to Karen.

She snorts. Matt fiddles with his glasses and bites down on a pleased smile. He turns his head in Foggy’s direction, and he thinks he might accidentally make “eye contact”, because Foggy’s heart jumps like he’s been startled. “You know what, it’s more than I deserve. I’ll take it,” says Matt, rolling over it like it never happened.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


Matt tries to remember, even though it feels restrictive and juvenile to check in every time that he goes out.

“Jesus, do you really do this so frequently?” Foggy asks, the third time that he calls that month.

“Yeah, usually. What did you expect?” Matt jumps up onto the couch and balances along the back.

“Maybe you were working overtime because a giant angry mafia type was tearing up the neighborhood. What do I know about being a vigilante?”

“Basically everything. There isn’t much I haven’t told you.” Matt jumps from the couch to the floor again, does a cartwheel with the phone still held in one hand. His armor is warm, which is great for autumn nights outside, and less great while bouncing around his apartment.

“I’m your friend, not your nanny. I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, just … pick up your phone once in a while, okay? And tell me if you’re hurt, don’t get all stoic and Catholic on me.”

That, at least, is a little easier. So when Foggy asks him if he wants to hit up O’Flannigan’s in Chelsea, Matt tells him honestly that he’s got a date with the rooftops, and Foggy goes all tense and anxious even though his tone doesn’t change when he says, “Okay, no problem. Don’t get stupid.”

Halfway through November, Matt gets back from accidentally scaring the shit out of some stoned teenagers and discovers three missed calls from Foggy. It’s late, he probably has a hairline fracture in his left ulna, but Claire is on shift until six in the morning, and his feet ache from a particularly rough landing off a dumpster. Just stripping down and cleaning up feels like a monumental task, let alone trying to sound normal with Foggy.

He balls his good hand into a fist and punches his own thigh. _Christ was whipped, tortured, and staked through the wrists to a piece of wood for your sorry ass. You can pick up the phone and call your best friend._ He dredges up yet more reserves of energy and dials. “Sorry, I was busy,” he says. “Couldn’t reach my phone. You okay?”

“Yep. I ran into Professor Delaney, I was gonna ask if you wanted to come down. Guess not, huh.”

“Please tell me he didn’t bring up the mock trial,” Matt says, and, “I might have broken my arm, but only a little.”

“You’re a fucking idiot,” says Foggy.

Another time, Matt does hear his phone. Marci, Karen, and Foggy are watching this really amazing free concert in Midtown, apparently, and Matt listens to them chattering and talking over each other and the music for a few minutes, until he smells coca leaves and limestone bundled up in paper further down the block.

“We missed you,” says Foggy the next day.

“We work together,” Matt reminds him. “I’m around at least eight hours a day if you want to see me.”

“That barely counts. You better have done something really heroic and legal." Foggy hits him in the shoulder.

Matt hides a wince. “You know me. Saving babies from burning buildings left and right.”

“Your idea of a good time is messed up, man,” Foggy tells him, and wanders away with a faintly reproachful air.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


The Wednesday before Thanksgiving sees the office closing early in the afternoon: Foggy has a train to catch out to Centerport, where his parents moved a few years ago (”There are hills, and trees, and this tiny purple flower plant fucking everywhere. I thought my mom hated that stuff,” he says every time that the subject comes up) and Karen has one to take up to some tiny town outside of Ithaca. Matt had known Foggy’s plans well in advance — had been hauled along for the holidays two years ago, in a moment of weakness — but Karen’s come as something of a surprise.

“I didn’t know you had family around,” he says. “You never said.”

“They’re not the sort of people you want with you in a crisis,” she explains. “Or when you’re in a really good mood.”

“Sounds promising. Sure you don’t want to become a Nelson for a day? You’re tall and blonde, no one will even notice,” Foggy interrupts, locking his office door with a metallic _click-click-click-thunk_ of the tumbler.

Matt tilts his head as a new thought occurs to him. “Do you look alike?” he asks.

There’s a pause, and then the rasp of hair being run through fingers. “She’s a little more platinum-y than me,” Foggy announces. “I wouldn’t say we’re twins or anything, but we could probably pass for cousins.”

“Huh,” Matt says. The new knowledge jostles uncomfortably in his head against his mental pictures of them.

“That’s sweet, but I don’t mind. My dad liked them, and my cousins aren’t too bad yet,” says Karen. Her tone of voice doesn’t invite questions. Neither of them ask.

Matt isn’t leaving the city or finding any dubious relatives with whom to spend time, but he has his own plans. There’s a dinner at Sacred Heart church; while he can’t fake not being blind well enough to actually help with the setup, or the cleanup, he can show up with guacamole and sit down where Father Lantom guides him, and he can charm the older women and lonely homeless men who show up until coffee is served. The fluorescent lights of the church basement buzz over and around the forty-odd near-strangers grouped around small tables, fading into the background as the conversation becomes less stilted and formal throughout the meal. By the time that they all join hands to pray after coffee, tiny Dolores with poor circulation grasps his hand less tentatively, and Barbara on his other side actually laces her fingers through his. It’s a touching expression of the sort of small, strange community that he does his best to protect; the sort that he thinks he fits better from the outside.

He gets into a fight later that night — or, he breaks up a fight. He doesn’t have anything but a cloth mask to tug over his face, but the men only have their fists, so it doesn’t matter much. Fair fight. They’re brothers, arguing over one of their wives like she’s a piece of meat even though he can hear her breathing right there next to them. Matt leaves his cane in the space between two large metal bins full of garbage and wades in. Dinner weighs unpleasantly in his stomach. “Get away from her,” he orders them.

“This is family business, little man,” says the one with the deeper voice and mild cardiac arrhythmia. Matt thinks he’s the one who’s married to the woman who apparently looked once too long at her husband’s brother. What a load of shit.

“Should’ve picked another alley,” he tells them. The two brothers are huge slow masses of displaced air, swinging their fists in side-sweeping arcs that are easy to anticipate and easy to dodge, but he can’t move them. His foot just sinks into the man’s beer gut and bounces off.He circles so that his back is to the woman, cutting her off from the brothers. They’re backed into a corner, which suits Matt just fine: there’s a dumpster just to his right that he can use as a step if he needs to bolt, and this way neither man can get around him to the woman. “You all right?” he asks her.

“I didn’t do anything,” she protests. It doesn’t sound like she’s addressing him. “It was just a cigarette.”

He tunes her out when arrhythmia brother roars and lurches forwards. Matt braces himself on the dumpster with the arm that isn’t probably broken and swings out so that his knees drive into the man’s solar plexus, relishes the man’s swearing as he doubles up wheezing and the jolt that runs through his own bones on contact. This is better.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


Karen comes to work the afternoon after Thanksgiving with the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and — inexplicably — peppermint still clinging to her skin. Matt doesn’t react only because he’s spent most of his life pretending that he isn’t a little thrown when someone close to him doesn’t smell like themselves.

“What sort of time do you call this, Miss Page?” Foggy asks in his most official of voices when Karen walks in.

She stops short. “Three? Like you said, right?”

“He did. Ignore him,” Matt advises, and she relaxes.

“Hey, I didn’t tell her she was late. I sincerely asked her if she knew the time. My watch is broken.”

This is a lie — Matt can hear the familiar ticking of the watch from his desk — and Karen gives him an exasperated sigh. He skims down the page and resumes his reading. They currently only have one case open; today will consist of brushing up on the legal structures and restrictions surrounding the specific law that their client, a young Mr. Shaun Black, is charged with violating — resisting arrest over what he insisted had been a deliberate misinterpretation of his words — and a meeting with said client in an hour or two. 

The office is quiet (as much as any one location can be in Manhattan). Matt pitches himself into reading and shuts his door so he can dictate notes to himself without distracting Karen any more than she already is, bursts of fidgeting followed by periods where she catches herself and stays as still as possible. He can still hear her through the door, of course, but she won’t have visual confirmation of that. It persists up through their client’s arrival; and Matt isn’t wholly surprised when she touches his shoulder after they conclude their meeting.

“I want to talk to you,” she says.

“Okay,” he says, keeping his voice light and pretending that he can’t tell that, whatever she wants to say, it’s been bothering her since she arrived. “Now?” They have maybe a minute before Foggy comes back from walking Mr. Black to the front door.

Her hair rustles against her blouse. “I just shook my head,” she says. “When you told me about … what you do … I said that they’d threatened me.”

He freezes. “I remember.”

Karen breathes out hard through her nose. “We are going to get more drunk than either of us have ever been in our lives, and then once I recover from the hangover — _if_ I recover — you are never going to bring it up again unless I tell you that you can.”

“Do I get to hear what it is before I agree to silence?” Matt asks.

“No.”

Foggy is walking back up the stairs. Matt wonders if she timed this so that he wouldn’t have the space to debate the issue. “I’m not bad at keeping secrets,” he says, with a crooked smile. “Just tell me when.”

  


~~*~~*~~

  


‘When’, Karen decides, is the following Friday after they close for the weekend. ‘Where’, she decides, is Josie’s Bar.

Forty-five minutes after they arrive, Josie offers them something called Zachariah’s Green Eel. Matt has been persuaded to try enough of the questionably legal brews that she sells that he raises his glass without question, but Karen covers his hand with her own to keep him from accepting anything. “No way,” she says. “The eel is for happy times. We’re trying to be sad drunks.”

Matt frowns, tries to remember whether he’s supposed to know what she’s talking about. 

Josie bursts out laughing deep in her chest. “Smart woman,” she says, and brings forth a heavy glass bottle for them instead. “Here. If you’re still smiling in an hour, drinks are free.”

The drink, whatever it is, burns on the way down his throat, and leaves a grainy aftertaste on his tongue so bitter that he actually shudders. Karen clinks her shot glass against his knuckles. “No turning back,” she says. “Cheers.”

They relocate to a booth at the back of the bar after Matt becomes dizzy enough that he knows the instant he falls off of his stool, he’s going to give up on fighting gravity and just lie on the floor until everything stops being so much. He doesn’t think that’s a _bad_ idea, per se, but the sticky-tacky spilled drinks and footprints on the floor would probably make him throw up if nothing else did. They stagger back.

Karen is a confusing blur, less than an arm’s length away, of grain alcohol and sweat masked by deodorant mixed with cotton and acrylic fibers — the Levites will be unhappy with her, even though she’s not religious so it probably doesn’t matter — he wants so badly to put his head down against the table but there are so many — _so many_ — sticky rings on the waxy wood. 

Towards the end of the bottle, talking becomes too much of an effort. Matt tries very hard to stay aware of Karen against everything that keeps happening around them. Karen is steeling herself — he can read it in her heartbeat and the way that she breathes like every inhale costs her. He makes himself drink water while he waits for her to talk, so he’ll hate himself a little less in the morning.

“I’m gonna ask you something,” she says into the mostly-empty glass near her face.

“Nothing too complicated.” He could probably give a really good closing statement right now, could give one in his sleep, but if she needs him to try to explain how he sees things, or to do math, then she’s shit out of luck.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Karen asks him, and his whole body goes numb. “You do your whole … _justice!_ … thing. Have you ever had to?”

Matt grips his glass tighter in his hands. “I tried. I don’t think…” There was frying blood and roasting meat mixed in with burnt cotton, but that hadn’t been — that wasn’t _him_. “I wanted to. I thought about it. I still think about it, but Foggy wouldn’t even kill me, he’d just be disappointed, and I’d probably damn myself because I wouldn’t regret it — not for the right reasons,”—

“I have,” she says loudly, words punching through his swirling half-formed thoughts.

Matt shuts his mouth. His stomach curdles, sucking all the heat from his skin and leaving a burning impotent horror in his core. Karen is right next to him, close enough to touch. He’s not dumb enough to reach out. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

There are a thousand fifty reasons he should be sorry, up to and including not incapacitating every single threat to her safety; for not understanding why she’d started to sound different a few months ago; for letting her carry this alone. He doesn’t think he can say any of the important ones. “I’m sorry you had to.”

“When you came to my apartment. When you told me. I thought _he’d_ be the one who knows what it’s like, of all the people I know, and so I thought you’d get it.” Karen slumps forwards and rests her head on the table, sticky rings be damned. Her heartbeat levels out despite the sweat under her nose and her arms, and she sounds tired, worn down like the moments just before Matt’s dad used to get his killing wind and beat his opponent bloody.

“What happened?” he asks. His mouth is dry. He makes himself drink more water. It changes nothing.

Karen shakes her head, and Matt wants to tell her to wash her hair because he can hear the crusty drink particles clinging to the strands as they brush the tabletop. “He was right in front of me and he was alive and then he wasn’t,” she says.

“Who?” Matt asks gently, or tries to. It comes out too loud, but the bar is packed and even though _he_ can hear every fucking conversation here, even though he’s having some trouble shutting it all out at once, this isn’t a problem that everyone has, right? They’ll be fine as long as Karen keeps mumbling into her arm like she’s doing now.

“He knew exactly who I cared about, who to threaten me with. I could see you dying, all noble and not knowing that I had the chance to save you and I threw it away. I didn’t know what to do, and then he acted — god, he acted like he knew me, like he knew exactly how little of a threat I was, and so I — I shot him. And he just kept looking at me, and his cell phone was going off and oh god, what if he answered?” Karen lifts her head off the table, pulse picking up again. “What if he didn’t die, and I didn’t know, and then the next day Ben — Ben showed up in the bay somewhere? What if I came in to work and Foggy was…? and I just. Kept. Going.” 

She punctuates the last sentence by punching the table, knuckles cracking down in all the wrong order and putting too much weight on her ring finger and Matt wants to take her hand and show her how to form a fist, a proper one that’s less likely to break her knuckles. He focuses on her hands as they fold over each other, one thumb rubbing over the knuckles of the other hand, and he struggles to hold onto all of her words.

“Matt?” she says, small and cracked.

“I feel like an ass for not figuring out that something was wrong,” he admits. “I heard something. Didn’t know what.” Then he has to stop and think, pressing his fists to his forehead to knead his brain into functioning again. 

“He doesn’t think I’m human.”

“Huh?”

“Not — Fisk’s man. Foggy. He said I’m not human.”

Something — jealousy, fear, Matt’s too damn drunk to figure it out — spikes out from his chest into his stomach. “Does he know?”

Karen snorts into her arm. “Hell no. He said it … generally. ‘Bout a month ago, before Fisk went to jail. I think you were fighting, you weren’t there. Like, look at those big bad evil murderers walking around like they’re still human, Karen, isn’t it great that you’re not one of them? Isn’t it so fucking lucky that you’re still human, Karen?”

For the first time in their shared history, Matt kind of wants to punch Foggy Nelson. He tamps down on the anger, channels it into finding Karen’s arm and putting his hand on her shoulder. “Your other boss can be a dick,” he says.

She turns her head towards him so her voice is clearer. “He didn’t say it like that. Not naming names. Being human, yeah. Yeah, he said that part.” She stretches away from him to take a long drink and settles back down. “Anyway, he said the same thing about you being a dick.”

“See? Foggy doesn’t know everything,” Matt tells her.

“I shot a man to death,” she says, acrid undertones to her voice, and if she’s expecting her bluntness to finally make him react badly to the revelation, she’s dead fucking wrong. Matt doesn’t usually let God have all the fun of judging, but Karen is — Karen is…

“I’m not Foggy,” he persists.

“Yeah, I know.” She sniffs. “Thank god, can you imagine?”

“No — that’s not the period. It’s the, um, what do you call it? Semicolon. I’m not Foggy; I don’t have the same … I want to believe that a sin is a sin is a sin, and the law is always enough …” He waits to make sure he’s got all of the words in the right order before he speaks again. “There are dark… things. People. It’s so hard to fight them with light, even though we should. You know that, and I know that. Sometimes it’s not enough. I’m glad that you’re here.” He holds out his hand, palm up. After a moment, her clammy fingers slip between his and hold tight.

They leave the bar a little while later, stumbling along and both of them tripping over Matt’s cane until they’ve found their way back to his apartment. Matt plants himself facefirst onto the bed; he starts to offer her the couch, but she just curls up next to him with her head just below his shoulderblade, because apparently the pillow is too far away to manage. 

“Okay?” she asks.

Her skull is nice and round and doesn’t really hurt where it presses against one of the gouges from Nobu’s swinging blades, so Matt supposes that it’s pretty much okay. “Not alone,” he mutters, the last thing he remembers before he falls asleep.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


The phone rings early the next morning underneath his pillow. Maybe it’s late the next morning; the only definite thing is that everything is syrup and smells like frying oil and Matt’s mouth feels like it’s been swabbed with a cotton ball doused in nail polish remover.

“What,” he croaks into the phone.

“Do you know where Karen is? I couldn’t get her cell.” Foggy’s voice is grating and loud, and bounces around Matt’s skull like a rubber bullet. 

“Uh…” Matt retraces his steps from the previous night. There’s a food cart underneath the window enveloping every other scent with its own, and Matt can’t handle trying to parse out the smells hiding underneath to figure out if Karen is or has been in the room. He reaches out gingerly across the bed, careful not to twist too much in case his stomach decides that it’s all too much and this is the end, goodbye world. A little ways away, his fingers reach a … a cloth thing that isn’t the bedsheets. He investigates further, and encounters a narrow wrist enveloped in the cloth. Shirt, probably. Not one of Matt’s. 

“You still with me?” Foggy booms.

“Ugh. Yeah. Yeah, I found her,” Matt reports, as he encounters Karen’s watch still hanging onto her wrist.

“What? Matt! Where did you find her? Are you hungover — did you crawl into a manhole doing vigilante shit?”

Matt pulls the phone away from his ear and presses the heel of his hand against his forehead. It doesn’t help, but he can deal. Then he thinks through the questions, and winces. “Hungover. At my place. She’s with me. We, uh, went to Josie’s.”

“Oh. Okay.” Now there’s a weird note to Foggy’s voice. That’s no good. “You … uh …”

“Jesus, no. I don’t actually — I don’t, you know.” The smell of frying oil weaves through his brain and cuts off any train of thought with a fresh cloud of nausea. “No,” he repeats.

“Okay, good. Listen, Brett says he might have a person in custody who doesn’t have a lawyer. I’m gonna head down to the precinct. You in?”

“Ugh,” Matt repeats. “When?”

“Will you be alive by one?”

Matt tries to locate his watch, and only succeeds in knocking his glasses off the table instead. “What time is it now?”

“Little before twelve.”

“Yeah, see you there,” he says, as the vastness of all that he needs to accomplish before then stretches out before him, a maze of obstacles and regret.

“Try not to look too hungover, man. I’m proud of you, but dude, your timing, it sucks.”

“Love you, too.” Matt hangs up and lets out a groan that gets cut off when Karen’s flailing hand finds his face. 

“Shut up,” she whines.

It takes a few minutes to convince her to wake up enough to help him look presentable. She informs him that his glasses mostly distract from the hell that is the rest of his face, which is not particularly encouraging; but once he’s showered and shaved, she pronounces him “basically not a train wreck”. He doesn’t have time to meditate his stomach into submission, so he downs some Advil and bananas, tells Karen she’s welcome to crash again until he gets back, and stumbles out the door to hail a taxi. The bells at St. Paul’s down on 57th street chime the hour a block before the taxi pulls up outside the precinct.

Foggy is lounging against a tree when he climbs out of the car, smelling like soap and cologne vigorously applied over last night’s Thai food. “On your two,” he calls.

Matt walks over and finds Foggy’s feet with his cane, then just keeps walking straight into Foggy and drops his head onto his shoulder.

“What the hell happened to you, buddy?” Foggy asks, patting his back. His arms are a wonderfully warm shield against Manhattan’s wind-tunnel streets, and Matt leans into him.

“Karen said I looked okay,” he mumbles.

“Sure, you’re okay. I’ll try to be the handsome one for once.” Foggy steps away and tugs on his arm. “Come, my weary friend. Let’s go meet the alleged client.”

The alleged client is sitting in the same room where they met Karen, or one which is indistinguishable from it. She washed herself yesterday before she was taken in, but Matt can still taste the blood on her skin and in her hair, and the grilled cheese she was given for lunch. She is clearly uncomfortable with their presence.

Matt lets Foggy do most of the talking, for once. He is able to draw out that her name is Elena Guzman, that she’s here for domestic violence, and that she in no way thinks she deserves to be punished when her boyfriend shouldn’t have raised a hand to her daughter in the first place. Matt pushes past his pounding head to focus on her heartbeat and the warm rounded vowels of her speech as they talk.

“So, how many fingers did you take off?” asks Foggy, and Matt loves him for saying it without a trace of amusement. “You get the thumb, too?”

“Just the four of them. Not even down to the bottom joint.” She sounds as though she regrets not getting the whole hand. Matt bites down on the inside of his cheek. “If I’d planned it, I’d’ve done a better job.”

“And for your sake, we’re glad you didn’t,” says Foggy. “Given the situation, let’s talk about your options.”

  


~~*~~*~~

  


Something is going down at the piers. Matt’s been hovering around there all week. He’s identified a few people who always just happen to be in the neighborhood of the as-yet-unrebuilt wreckage of Pier 57: a heavyset man who always has a turkey sandwich for lunch; later at night, a woman shows up wearing a citrus perfume that makes Matt’s nose itch; and a man who’s always the easiest to identify by his perpetual, unfiltered Parliaments.

Despite Matt’s best efforts, he still doesn’t know what they’re doing here. He’s narrowed their area of focus down to a group of five containers that, unlike the others in the area, aren’t full of wood, or sawdust, or have been bone-dry empty for weeks.

The first week of December, the perfume-wearing one’s shift gets interrupted by the chain-smoker, and Matt finally _finally_ has an opportunity to drop to the ground and start in on the lock of the first container. 

The world narrows to just the hollow space inside of the padlock, the clock of the lockpicks inside that space, and his own breathing. He’s got most of the tumblers into place before he registers the vibrations of two sets of returning footsteps on the floor. _Please, God,_ he thinks as he lifts one pick up hopefully, even though that’s not how it works, and keeps working right up until he hears the hammer of a pistol about a hundred feet behind him.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


Claire sighs when she opens the door for him and steps aside. “Come in.”

“Thanks,” Matt says. He limps towards the couch, keeping his back as straight and stiff as possible.

“Well, you’re not leaving a giant trail of blood this time, that’s encouraging,” she says, clearly weary. She’s in sweatpants, but still smells like the hospital, probably just came off a shift.

Matt manages a huff of laughter around whatever the woman’s bullet and the man’s heavy boots did to his back. “Check for broken bones?” he asks. “Please.”

Claire stays back and lets him lower himself towards the couch, kneeling with his face on the cushions. “It’d help if you took off your shirt,” she says.

Matt makes a face. It would be dangerously easy to respond flippantly; to fall back into the rhythm of flirting without really flirting, posturing at each other until she’s willing to overlook that he is not a good person, not for her and not for God. He grits his teeth and strips off his armor and undershirt in one quick, agonizing movement that has him gasping into the couch as soon as he finishes. Behind him, Claire makes a sympathetic noise.

“You gonna tell me what happened?” she asks. “Besides you getting a hell of a beating.”

“Wish I knew,” he says. “Better not to tell you, anyway.”

She kneels down next to him. Her hand hovers by his shoulder, radiating heat over where the bullet connected with his armor and left an insistent well of pain behind. “Just tell me if it’s gonna blow up into something as big as last time,” she says. “I’m gonna put my hand on your shoulder now, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. I don’t think so, but who knows? They didn’t even know who they were working for. Strange, not big,” Matt says, before he has to stop talking and concentrate on not making any noise while she manipulates his arm. He recites the Lord’s Prayer in his head to distract himself, dragging through the lines so that the words hold their meaning instead of simply blending together into nonsense syllables with repetition. “Inhale, slowly,” says Claire, breaking the pattern. He obeys. She presses down between his shoulder blade and spine, and Matt whimpers involuntarily.

“Sorry,” she murmurs.

He takes his leave as soon as she’s completed her assessment and determined that, while he probably cracked his fourth and fifth ribs, he’s lucky, and hasn’t punctured anything important. “If you want tea, I’ve got decaf,” she offers. “Before you go.”

Matt is already beginning the process of pulling his shirt back on. “Thanks, but I’ve got work in the morning.” He raises his arms up, twisting over towards the right to see if that will make it any less painful.

“Hold still.” Claire takes his wrist and tugs his shirt down so he doesn’t have to move as much. Her hands are clinical and controlled as ever. It doesn’t stop Matt from wanting to lean into them, to touch with purpose instead of necessity. 

He turns away from the scent of her shampoo and goes right back to reciting his sixth _our father, who art in heaven_ until the process is over and he can leave without torturing himself beyond what he must.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


The first day of Shaun Black’s trial (the only day, if Matt has his way) starts with the winter winds chasing each other down the streets on the way to the courthouse. Matt keeps trying to hunch his shoulders against the wind and is harshly reprimanded, every time, by the impact wounds on his shoulder and back. The morning does get marginally better when he gets inside the courthouse and Foggy manhandles his free hand out of his coat pocket to give him a cup of coffee. He claps Matt on the back in greeting; Matt winces. “I may have cracked a rib,” he mutters, when Foggy starts to display all kinds of concerned body language.

“Dude,” says Foggy. He runs his hand over the affected area, more lightly.

The day takes a slow, stately nosedive a couple of hours after that, starting when Matt tries to gesture dramatically at their client with his right hand, and his hearing momentarily shorts out with pain. He recovers his balance and forges ahead with their opening statement. But three sentences in, even with most of his attention focused on the jury, he can hear the gradual acceleration of Foggy’s heartbeat behind him. “My client comes to you today — instead of to his church, where he regularly volunteers his time as part of his faith community — because he has been wrongfully accused of resisting arrest,” Matt plows on, because he is a professional, dammit, and if he can move almost normally with deep bruises spread across his upper back, then he can keep his voice level and expression unwavering even while he refocuses on Foggy breathing too fast and too shallow. “The prosecution would have you believe that running a traffic light before he was out of high school makes Mr. Black a suspicious character.” 

He tilts his head to bring Foggy into better focus. He doesn’t smell ill, feels slightly flushed but not feverish, and would definitely be pissed if Matt stumbled because he was worried about why Foggy is apparently having a panic attack. It might be bad because Foggy is handling the cross-examination, and it’s not like Matt has no faith in his own abilities as a lawyer, but Foggy is better at rewording arguments on his feet — not to mention, all of his notes are printed and therefore useless. Matt pushes through his last few sentences, keeps his cool, and assures the jury that the evidence will prove far too thin to indisputably place Black at the scene with an appropriate means, even if he had the motive, to attack the officer in the manner described; and all the while Foggy’s body betrays some sort of silent freakout.

By the time Matt slides back into his seat, Foggy isn’t hyperventilating, at least. Matt gives their twitchy client a reassuring nod before he leans in to Foggy. “You okay?” he murmurs.

“Yep. So okay.” Foggy exhales deeply, in the pause before the prosecution begins their examination. He shifts away from Matt, so subtly that Matt would think it was subconscious were it not for the final staccato burst of his heartbeat before it starts to settle. Matt swallows and folds his hands on the table. The prosecution layers questions on the witnessing police officer, voice brimming with calm assurance that gets under Matt’s skin. Foggy and his apparent discomfort remain a much more interesting presence to observe than the prosecution, even though this is important, this whole case is authoritarian bullshit that Matt will fight to his dying breath, but Foggy’s still agitated — 

Foggy reaches out and lays his fingers across the back of Matt’s hand, which is startling and distracting until he moves: _tap tap tap pause, brush pause, brush brush brush,_ and so on. Morse code:

_Stop listening to my pulse._

Matt smiles in spite of himself. _Sorry_ , he taps back, and makes himself breathe. Foggy squeezes his hand for a second before letting go, and then Matt is able to focus his full attention on the prosecuting attorney up until it’s time for Foggy to take the floor for the cross-examinations.

They get a chance to talk during lunch — first with their client, where they can give him the layman’s rundown of the proceedings and he can ask questions, and then privately when they ask him for a moment to “talk shop”.

“I was just sitting there, it took a couple minutes to figure out what was going on,” Foggy protests. “I hid it really well, Shaun didn’t even notice, and you,” — he prods Matt’s good shoulder — “should’ve been doing your job, not _scanning_ me.”

“I wasn’t consciously trying to read you. It’s hard not to notice. You wouldn’t at least blink if … if a candle, more like a room full of candles, if one of them suddenly started flickering?”

“That’s what a panic attack looks like, huh?”

“It’s not that easy. It’s more like… if someone’s heartbeat goes up and their surface body temperature starts fluctuating, _and_ they start breathing differently, then they might be panicking. And I know you, so that makes it easier to figure out.” 

“Anyone ever tell you that’s kind of creepy?” Foggy asks, but he sounds interested, and he’s still sitting close enough for the fabric of his shirt to brush against Matt’s jacket when he moves his arm.

“Once or twice. So you don’t know what happened?” Matt repeats.

Foggy is silent for a moment, playing with the edges of his paper placemat. “Dammit, Matt. A man’s allowed to have an epiphany without his partner’s creepy lie-detecting radar broadcasting it to the whole diner,” he says.

“An epiphany, huh?”

Foggy picks that moment to shove the rest of his turkey club into his mouth. When he finishes chewing, an awkward thirty seconds later, he says, “Yeah. I was sitting there thinking about you up there, being all injured and stoic about it, and I realized what a terrible business decision I’d made, hitching my post to a vigilante.”

Matt kicks him under the table. He’s lying — about what, Matt can’t tell. “You’re an ass,” he says. “You’d tell me if it was important, though.”

“Duh. I’m not — you know I would.” He pushes himself out of his slouch and makes an audible effort to pull himself together. “Also, pretty sure one of the jurors thought we were holding hands because _someone_ had to go be a hero and can’t pass notes anymore,” he says with a laugh that sounds forced. “See? Terrible decision, ruining my chances of looking like a Spock-type badass in court.”

Matt lets the subject drop. “Spock?” he asks, eyebrows raised.

“Sure. In control of his emotions, personal bubble a mile wide,” says Foggy. “You can be Kirk, obviously. Risk-taking, insubordinate ladies’ man.”

Matt bites down on a laugh before he injures himself any more. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  


~~*~~*~~

  


So Foggy has his secrets. That’s … well, Matt has no license to be offended by anyone keeping secrets from him, but all the logic and prayers in the world can’t completely silence the part of him that’s used to living in close quarters with Foggy and still wants to know him as completely as he knows the layout of his own apartment. _Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s possessions_ goes beyond physical possessions: it encompasses jealousy over another’s talents, their job, and, reasonably, the way that they spend their time, and the inner workings of their occasionally-indecipherable brain.

Even so, Matt feels more settled in his skin once he gets an inkling of why Foggy went panicked and still as he listened to Matt give vague statements about impartial justice and past performance not being an indicator of future results a fortnight ago. It takes a while to put the pieces together; it clicks while they’re on the way to a shop that sells, swear-to-god-I’m-not-exaggerating-Matt, thirty different types of donuts. Along with tea and coffee, but mostly more donuts than could or should possibly exist — so of course they need to go investigate.

“You haven’t seen Marci in a while,” Matt says. He lets the statement hang in the air between them. 

Foggy steers him out of the way of a woman talking on her phone, apparently oblivious to the world around her. “What, do I not smell enough like her?” he asks sharply, defensive.

Matt knows he deserves to feel exactly as guilty as he does. “You haven’t mentioned her in a while,” he says, which is true but also not the answer to his question. Foggy draws a breath and holds it for half a beat too long, the way that he does when he’s reconsidering what he was about to say. Matt sucks it up already. “And you use a different type of soap when you sleep at her apartment,” he confesses.

“There it is.” Foggy half-turns towards him and makes some sharp gesture with his free hand. “It’s shit like that that’s frustrating. I never know if I’m being paranoid or overthinking things. Just tell me.”

“You didn’t seem very comfortable with the idea.” It sounds like a weak excuse. Maybe it is.

“Crosswalk,” Foggy says, holding him back. “It’s weird that you know when I’m getting laid, but I know that already. It sucks more that you think I’m going to break if you lie about it.”

“I don’t want…”

“Let’s cross.”

Matt holds his tongue while they leave the crowded sidewalk behind and head towards a building whose glass walls produce a refracted double-echo that he does his best to block out in favor of the more solid rhythm of their footsteps on the pavement above the subway. Foggy’s steps are heavier than his own, and every ten or eleven paces he has to readjust his balance to compensate for the difference in their heights and the length of his stride; he’s been doing it for so long that he might not even be aware of it anymore.

“If you bring your own soap, and don’t put on the clothing from the day before when you go home, that’s most of it,” he offers. “There are other things, but I could … if you want…”

“So if I want you to think that me and Marci are still seeing each other, I should ask to borrow her soap,” says Foggy, a thoughtful humming undertone in his voice.

“You shower more thoroughly afterward, too,” Matt adds.

“Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, huh?” Foggy says. “There’s a chihuahua that’s going for your stick — yeah, your dog, watch that thing,” —Matt pulls his cane to his chest — “Tiny rat. I guess it doesn’t matter. That ship sailed.”

“I’m sorry,” says Matt, and is slightly surprised that he is, he is.

Foggy shrugs against his side. “I told her some stuff. Emotional baggage, you know. She reminded we we’re not actually together. We watched a movie and then I left.” His heart pounds just a little too fast as he says it; juxtaposed with his offhand tone, Matt can tell that whatever actually happened, he’s omitting something important.

“I can hear your pulse go up. You don’t have to tell me. I’ll buy your donuts,” he says, and is rewarded by a friendly headbutt against his good shoulder. “How much farther?”

“Almost there. Lots of scaffolding over the whole building. Stick close, okay?”

Matt is prepared to be underwhelmed by their destination, once they reach it; but when they do, Foggy ends up having to guide him to a table and sit down with him for a moment while he gets his bearings. There are _so many_ variations on the basic "fried dough with sprinkles" smell, plus some truly strange hints of sage and rosemary, and someone who owns a dog that hasn't been washed in weeks, and someone else who was in a candle store before this; there are strange soft decorations on the wall above their head that muffle some sounds and echo others in unexpected ways, and the speakers are playing swing from the nineties twelve feet over their heads. Matt grins at Foggy and reaches into his coat for his wallet.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


NPR is doing a surprisingly interesting segment on ethanol-based fuel sources when Foggy calls. Matt turns down the radio. “Mr. Nelson?”

“Hey buddy,” says Karen, in a terrible imitation of Foggy’s cadence. “Quick question. What do you know about quiche?”

“Um, nothing. Why are you — where’s Foggy?”

“What’re you talking about? I’m right here, Matty old boy,” says Karen.

“That’s not what I sound like,” says Foggy in the background, voice bouncing off of what sounds like linoleum. “You’re terrible at this.”

“You kind of are,” Matt tells her. Karen giggles. He frowns. “Are you day drinking?” ( _Without me?_ asks a very small and very petulant voice in the back of his mind.)

“No! I am shocked that you would think that,” says Karen. She isn’t even bothering to lower her voice into a Foggy-like register. “I haven’t done that since …” She covers the receiver with her hand, saying, “When was the last time you got drunk before noon?”

“Like two months ago,” Foggy says in the background.

“…in days,” Karen relays to Matt.

“Here, gimme,” says Foggy, snort-laughing the way he does when he’s either tipsy or really, truly happy. Matt grins, hearing it. There’s a brief rustling and tossing noise on the other end. “Hey!” says Foggy, much more clearly this time. “Light of my life and pain in my ass, here’s the deal. How do you feel about free food?”

“Is there a lecture open to graduates somewhere?” Matt asks, perking up. Nelson & Murdock isn’t yet prosperous enough that he’s going to turn down food, no matter how suspicious the circumstances.

Foggy snorts. “Not unless you wanna give it. Listen, we’ve got a quiche. Handmade, lots of love and special gooey feelings baked into it. Should we bring it over?”

Matt raises his eyebrows. “Are you and Karen trying to cook?”

“Not trying! Succeeding!” Foggy insists. “Completely sober, too. Covered in flour, but what’re you gonna do?”

“I _told_ him you can’t measure flour like sugar,” Karen says in the background.

“Anyway,we were going to do lunch on the fire escape of Karen’s building, but it sort of didn’t come out the way it was supposed to, so we thought,”—

—”I thought,”—

“Who appreciates shitty cuisine?”

It all makes sense now. “Thanks, man. Can’t tell you how flattered I am to get the rejects from your lunch date,” says Matt.

There’s a half-second pause, and then Foggy blurts out, “Not a date, so not a date,” too fast and shit, Matt had meant it as a joke, he hadn’t actually thought — they’re so relaxed around each other, none of the unevenness and ill-fitting edges to their voices and movements that usually tell him what eye contact and facial expressions tell other people.

“My bad. Quiche sounds great,” Matt says, even though it sounds like nothing of the sort. “And hey, I hear pasta salad’s pretty hard to screw up. If you need ideas.”

  


~~*~~*~~

Once Matt recovers from quiche-based food poisoning (they both apologize profusely, but once he’s done puking, Matt is mostly just amused) it’s time to reconsider the situation on the pier. The chain-smoker is easier to locate on a day-to-day basis than the others who just so happen to be in the area all the damn time, so he starts making time to follow him. The man is largely a creature of habit, but there’s one person who stands out in his routine of work-home-work-home-pier-home-work; a woman he meets in various hotel receptions several times over the course of a few weeks — possibly more frequently, but during the day, Matt only has an hour or so around lunchtime to do his work, and his cane makes him too visible to risk eavesdropping even from a distance. 

They don’t appear to be attracted to each other, or even to like each other all that much. Her suit is made from material that doesn’t catch on itself when she moves, in contrast to his pilling fabric; Matt guesses that in the chain of people who might lead him to something interesting, someone in a suit is a more likely candidate than the grunts in jeans and poorly-insulated winter jackets.

Matt adjusts his target list accordingly, and prepares himself to confess a mugging to Father Lantom next week. 

~~*~~*~~

~~*~~*~~

  


Nelson & Murdock settles a client’s case out of court during the third week of Advent; no prison or fines, just thirty days of community service that Matt credits partially to being able to call the district attorney’s bluffs, and partially to Foggy bitching the man out spectacularly. They celebrate by holding a small going-away party for the electric bill that they can now afford to pay for the month. Matt drops it in the mail slot with a flourish; Karen and Foggy stand by and clap and shiver.

The days before Christmas consist mainly of paperwork and bickering over which pieces of evidence to submit for Elena Guzman’s case. Foggy describes photos to Matt, and Matt reads phone records to Foggy; Karen corrects spelling errors in their statements and rearranges syntax because, as she puts it, “you talk beautifully for a living; how does that not translate into writing?”

Foggy has, miracle of miracles, wheedled Karen into coming to Long Island with him for Christmas. Foggy’s family collects strays the way that other people collect free samples: with open arms and gleeful abandon, regardless of whether they need them or not. In his better moments, Matt is pleased: it’ll be good for Karen to spend a couple of days surrounded by people who will think she’s wonderful purely on the basis of her association with Foggy. When he’s feeling less noble, Matt reminds himself that Foggy is allowed to bring other friends home to meet his family, that it doesn’t mean he’s putting Matt out on the street for adoption or throwing their office’s sign in the trash (again). (He’d even asked Matt — “My dad missed you at Thanksgiving.” “He knows we’re not actually married, right?” Matt had responded, amused — but the Nelsons don’t live within walking distance of a Catholic church, and he would prefer to go to midnight mass at his own church and not put anyone out.)

On Christmas Eve, once he’s seen Karen and Foggy off, Matt makes a call and then waits outside of Claire’s apartment building, sniffling behind his scarf as he watches pedestrians and cars go by. The cold brings humanity into sharp relief, from their breath heating the air, to their coats surrounding their bodies, fuzzing their outlines with insulation, to the particular way that the slush makes footsteps crackle and splash. If he shuts his eyes, Matt can almost imagine that when he opens them, he’ll be able to see the colors of the people around him.

A familiar combination of scents, aloe and disinfectant and that deodorant that’s supposed to have no smell, comes his way. Matt turns his face to Claire. “Hey there,” he says, voice calm even though he still can’t help the stupid fizzing in his chest or the warmth in his stomach.

“You look okay,” she says.

Matt grins. “Thanks, I guess?”

Claire’s hands stay in her pockets. “I mean, I think this is the first time I’ve seen you and you weren’t bleeding,” she rushes to explain.

“Ah. Sorry to disappoint. You want me to come back later?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she says, “but no. Not-beaten-up is a good look on you. I’m just wondering why you called, if there’s no damsel in distress.”

“I can be a damsel if you’d like,” Matt says before he can think better of it, and flushes. “Sorry. I swear I’m not trying to, um …” He trails off as she shifts away from him. A drop of freezing rain lands on his nose; the air above thickens with the promise of more to come. “I got you a present.” He holds out the package.

“Why?” Claire asks. She takes it from him slowly, her movements measured. She slides her nail under the tape and unwraps the paper with equal care. 

“It doesn’t quite say ‘thanks for saving my life’, but I don’t have that kind of money,” Matt explains. Claire _hmphs_ under her breath as she pulls the DVD case out of its wrapping. “I’ve never seen it, but I hear a lot of people talking about it on the street, and apparently it’s closer to life than other medical shows. According to the internet.”

“You got me _Scrubs_?” she asks, tone difficult to decipher. One hand touches the corner of her mouth.

“I don’t know much else about you,” Matt admits, hunching in on himself against a few more drops of rain.

“No, you don’t,” she says.

“There’s a gift receipt.”

“No, I liked _Scrubs_.” She taps the box, sounding thoughtful. “I like Calle 13, too.”

“Oh?”

“They’re a band. So you don’t have to ask the internet what to think about them.”

“Oh.” Matt tries not to beam at her, like she hasn’t just made him feel both buoyant and childishly small. “Thank you.” He shoves one hand back into his pocket, bounces his cane off the toe of his shoe with the other. “Merry Christmas, then.”

“Merry Christmas. Thanks. It was … unexpectedly sweet of you.”

He ducks his head. “I’ll try not to see you too soon.”

“Even better.” Claire leans forwards, and Matt holds very still as she kisses his cheek. She is calm and unaffected by their closeness, and for the first time, he thinks he’s made his peace with that.

  


~~*~~*~~

  


Matt and Foggy’s initial plan is to go to Josie’s Bar for New Year’s Eve: an unofficial tradition three years in the running that has never once ended without some sort of injury. Then Karen lets slip that she usually watches the ball drop on TV, and spends her money on really nice champagne instead. Foggy throws a discreet wad of paper at Matt, who flips him off, _message received,_ and finds a way to mention offhand that the weird blend of chaos and synchronicity of the celebration gets to be a lot for his senses, even more so with the combination of crowds and alcohol, so maybe, maybe …

They end up maneuvering their plans so that they arrive at Karen’s apartment a few hours before midnight, bearing pizza and games and, most importantly, booze. Matt reminds himself that pride is a sin and so he should not be this pleased with himself for how happy she sounds when she invites them in. He thinks that it may have more to do with Foggy, anyway. His voice and warmth, always sticking close to her, fill the small apartment with creatively embroidered tales from the days before they met, dispelling the cold corners and the lingering ghosts. Matt has heard — or taken part in — most of them already, so he settles in, wraps himself in the bounding cadence of Foggy’s voice and Karen’s steadily loosening laughter, and listens to make sure that no one’s glass is empty, even though technically Karen is hosting.

By the time that they move from the table to the couch around eleven o’clock, his head buzzes with whiskey and the happy flush that has risen in all of them. He elbows Foggy into the middle of the couch and throws himself down next to him, so that Karen can sit on his other side and they can play cards.

“You’re sure you won’t read our hands?” Karen asks. A handful of cards cut the air with a plastic slapping sound. “No cheating.”

“I promise I can’t read Braille without actually touching it,” he assures her. “I’m not that good.”

He doesn’t know how long they play cards; but after Karen has lost every one of her quarters, she turns on the television, and they listen to a poorly transmitted performance that Matt could hear better from on the _roof_ , probably. He doesn’t say anything — it’s not the time to complain. Now is the time to take off his glasses and sink back as far as the starchy cushions will allow.

“Okay okay okay, one minute to go, how are we doing this?” asks Foggy, moving so that his back is to the TV and he faces both of them. “We all need a terrifying amount of good luck, I don’t want anybody left out.”

Matt is about to ask what he means, but Karen gets there first. “Is it possible to kiss two people at once? Maybe if we all mushed our faces together,” she says, words distorting in a way that suggests she’s squishing her face between her hands to demonstrate.

Matt laughs and rapidly recalibrates. He sees an opportunity and goes for it. “What about Foggy, you kiss Karen, and then you two can flip a coin for me? I think we have some margin for error, as far as luck goes.”

“Now, that’s just depressing,” says Foggy, patting him on the shoulder. “Look at this poor sonuvabitch, trying to be a hero and pretending he’s not the hottest guy in the room.”

“Pour the champagne, you vegetable,” Matt says, grinning and feeling his face heat up. Karen snorts into her drink. “Countdown’s about to start.” 

“Shit.” Foggy launches himself at the table and the open bottle. He pours it into the cheap flutes that they bought at the end of their second year of law school. The champagne fizzes and froths. He settles back into the space between Matt and Karen. Matt holds out his hand; Foggy passes him the champagne and wraps his fingers around the stem, sloshing the contents gently.

 _Ten_ , says the city, thousands of voices in twenty-odd different languages raised in unison, bent towards a single purpose; _nine_ , and the city is joined by the voices of his family: Foggy, whose arm rests around Matt’s shoulders and whose heart rate and sweat glands indicate that he is for once completely at ease with this, with them; and Karen, who is pressed warm against Foggy’s other side even though she has plenty of room, the cold notes in her voice softened even if they’re never gone. _Eight_ , they count along with the crowd in Times Square on the television. Matt tips his head back and smiles so hard that it hurts his cheeks. 

_Seven —_

_Six —_

_Five —_

_Thank you, Lord,_ he says in his head. _Thank you for the love and mercy that has been shown to me._ “Four,” he counts aloud, at Foggy’s prodding. Karen shifts, the ends of her hair against the same flannel shirt that touches Matt’s arm and the back of his neck. The air is thick with electrically generated heat, with the dust of the three of them and with the debris that they trailed into Karen’s apartment from the outside world.

_Three,_ says the city. 

_Protect them if it is Your will,_

“Two…” 

_And if it is not, then give me the strength to protect them, and forgive me for what I will do to anyone who tries to harm those I love._

—“One,” they say, volume rising — 

_Amen._

“Happy new year!” Foggy shouts in his ear. Matt faces the television as Karen lifts her head from Foggy’s shoulder and kisses him, whooping and giggling into his mouth. Foggy’s heart skips; hers goes strong and fast. Matt smiles to himself, and then Foggy twists in his seat, dangerously close to spilling his champagne, and kisses him too. Matt catches his face with his free hand, tastes wine and pizza and saliva and the chapstick that Karen applied a few hours ago. The combination is unexpectedly endearing and a tiny part of him thinks _oh_ and then _oh, no._

“Happy new year,” he says, and goes to sit back, but Foggy pushes him forwards. 

"You’re not done yet,” he says. Matt has half a second’s warning in the movement of heat and fabric to tell him that Karen is leaning across Foggy’s legs, so he should meet her halfway. Her heart doesn’t quicken the way that it did a few seconds before, but she smiles against his lips, and squeaks when he kisses her nose, too. 

“To the new year,” she says, raising her glass. “To making Hell’s Kitchen a better place.” 

“To wealthy, innocent clients who have no connection to the Mafia,” says Foggy. 

“To the best lawyer and the most kickass legal assistant I know,” says Matt. 

They clink their glasses against his and drink against a backdrop of grainy celebratory shouting and music on the television, echoed hundreds of times over in the apartments and buildings that surround them. 

The champagne tastes overpoweringly of pear trees and some unholy variation on maraschino cherries. Matt puts his glass on the table, careful not to make any face that would let Foggy know he isn’t thrilled by his alcohol selection. He drops his head onto Foggy’s shoulder and breathes in deeply. Karen changes the channel to a live brass band playing the Star Spangled Banner, and then _Oh Say Can You See_. Sometime after _God Bless America_ and a commercial break, he registers the slight shrug and a sigh that tells him that, on the other side of the couch, Karen has followed suit. She reaches across Foggy to pet Matt on the head. Her fingers are cool with condensation and tiny droplets of champagne that linger in his hair. 

“We’re going to sleep now? Really? Lame,” says Foggy. His voice reverberates pleasantly through Matt’s skull, a lower and steadier counterpoint to his heartbeat. 

“Just gearing up for round two,” Matt lies. 

“Not me. I’ve got Foggy Nelson and the Daredevil watching over me. I’m going to sleep like a rock, and I’m going to do it right now,” says Karen. “Don’t try to stop me.” 

“I’ll go party by myself, then,” Foggy grumbles, but he slowly slouches down until he’s at a more comfortable angle for her to use as a pillow. Matt listens to his breathing slow to normal, feels the muscles underneath him relax, and waits until both Foggy and Karen are completely asleep before he shuts off the television and lets himself drift off with them. 


	2. Winter and Spring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which feelings are had, Matt goes confession, someone else is interested in Matt's vigilante escapades, and three people who aren't good at talking about their feelings have a lot of uncomfortable conversations. Also, a fancy dinner. See the end notes for a brief content warning regarding violence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...so when I said "in a few days", what I really meant was that I'd panic for a month, start to rewrite the entire second chapter (all of two scenes survived unscathed), then get overwhelmed for months and not do anything until the end of May. Sorry about that.
> 
> If you read the first chapter before this one was posted, I've edited one scene and added a second shorter one - if you're just here for the romance then go ahead and skip it, they're only relevant to the sub-plot.
> 
> AU as of Season 2, which I haven't bothered to watch.
> 
> Also AU for winter 2015-2016, because when I started writing, forecasts were for another winter like the one we had last year, and I was too lazy to go back and change it.

Matt wakes up with the sun warming his shoulders and an irregular knobby shape pressed into his cheek. He lies still and waits for the world to come into focus. A pulse underneath him, warmth extending down in a line to his elbow, and then cold skin on his arm: he’s lying on top of Karen’s legs, head on her knee. Her feet are cold and probably asleep. The woven polyester underneath his fingers belongs to the couch. Leftovers from last night are still on the table, eggs are frying in butter in the kitchen, and there is a distinct absence of Foggy on the couch with them.

He sits up slowly, stretching muscles that are stiff from spending the night curled up in one position and being shot at a few weeks prior. Karen shifts, but her breathing remains even. Matt stands up and maneuvers his way around the couch into the kitchen, where he can register heat from the stove top and from Foggy standing in front of the stove, scraping at a hot frying pan. He doesn’t turn around, apparently intent on the eggs; Matt comes up behind him and touches his shoulder. “Morning.”

“Oy!” Foggy jumps, heart rate spiking, and Matt dodges a spatula whistling towards his face, crumbs of scrambled egg hitting him as he goes. He grabs the spatula and twists it out of Foggy’s hand, steps to the side, freezes. Foggy stands motionless with his back to the stove.

They regard each other. “Uh. Sorry. Reflex,” says Matt. He holds out the spatula.

“Same. You could give a little warning, next time.” Foggy doesn’t sound particularly irritated, just startled, and he goes back to scrambling eggs.

“I didn’t want to wake up Karen,” Matt explains, edging just far away enough that Foggy doesn’t elbow him in the ribs, still close enough to keep a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m awake now,” Karen mutters from the couch. “What happened?”

“Matt being a creeper,” Foggy says.

The couch creaks. “Is that new?”

“Ouch,” Matt says.

“Plates are in the cabinet in front of your right shoulder; I need three,” Foggy says. 

In the living room, Karen leans over the creaking arm of the couch. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“Making breakfast,” Foggy tells her. “Sort of. I’m making eggs. Matt’s going to get bagels.”

Matt yanks back the plate that he had been about to give to Foggy. “I am?”

“Yeah, unless you’ve learned how to make pancakes since we graduated.” 

Matt feels the movement of air as Foggy reaches for the plate, and takes a sweeping step backwards, colliding with the refrigerator. Foggy grabs his wrist with one hand, taking the plate from his grasp with the other. If Matt wasn’t feeling lazy and indulgent, he could’ve jumped to the side, fought harder to keep away from Foggy, but they’re having breakfast together on a completely useless national holiday, and not working, so he relents.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, by my hand-eye coordination is kind of shit,” Matt says. “Where’s your wallet?”

After breakfast, they linger at Karen’s apartment into the early afternoon. The only audiobook that Karen has is Harry Potter, so Matt washes the dishes instead, and stretches while Foggy and Karen watch a documentary about lemurs. Once the credits come on, Karen starts fidgeting and fussing with the furniture in a way that suggests she doesn’t know what else to do with guests in the house. Foggy gets up, heavy footsteps coming to a halt in front of Matt, who is pushing himself out of a split. Foggy grabs Matt’s hands and pulls him to his feet.

“Come on,” he says. “I’m going to meet my sister for lunch. Or … something involving food. You want to come?” he asks, voice moving to encompass Karen in the offer as they move towards the door.

Karen gets the door while they bundle into their coats and scarves. “Thanks. Maybe next time,” she says, without the usual mild increase in heartbeat, so it might not actually be a polite lie.

“Nah. I think there’s still enough time to catch the afternoon mass if we leave now,” Matt says. “Tell your sister I said hi.”

“We’ll see you on Monday and you can tell us about it then,” Karen says. Foggy’s gloves rub against his skin as he drags them on. A bare hand — Karen’s — rests on Foggy’s coat, and her pulse is suddenly loud in Matt’s ears as she kisses Foggy — on the cheek, just on the cheek, Matt can still feel Foggy exhaling towards the door, not facing Karen directly. “See you,” she says. Then she turns to Matt. Her heart flutters with anxiety. Matt passes his cane to Foggy and pulls her into a hug before it becomes obvious that she doesn’t want to kiss him, too. She runs her hands up and down his back once, twice before she pulls away, warm and steady.

“Thanks for coming,” she says. “Both of you.”

Matt waits until the door has closed behind them to bury his face in Foggy’s shoulder and let himself grin helplessly.

“What?” Foggy asks.

“We have good ideas sometimes,” Matt says, and leaves it at that.

~~*~~*~~

Matt spends the first three days of the new year alternating between hiding in his apartment, and doing his best to fight crime in the lingering slush and ice. He checks on the pier where he got shot investigating the inexplicable crates of rubble, but there’s only so much that he can do without more information, and no one is there to provide any. He goes to Sunday mass, where the rhythms of the celebration sink into his bones; and later that night, he sends a policeman to the hospital for harassing a homeless man. The policeman gets in a couple of punches, and Matt’s going to end up with a bruise where his fist connected with his goggles, but he breaks the policeman’s jaw in at least one place. The day’s activities are sufficient to put him to sleep nearly the moment that he falls into bed, satisfyingly exhausted.

He wakes up sore and wincing from a blow to his recently healed arm. It isn’t even close to the worst injury he’s ever sustained, but it’s not comfortable by a long stretch, and he’s not going to try to hide it when it’s just Foggy and Karen. Somewhat to his surprise, the thought of having to confess his to Foggy doesn’t make him any less eager to see him on Monday morning. They haven’t spoken since leaving Karen’s house.

Foggy greets Matt by running his thumb along Matt’s cheekbone where the policeman’s fist connected. Matt flushes. “What’d you do to yourself this time?” Foggy asks, resigned.

“Nothing awful, I promise. You should see the other guy.”

“You know that’d be funnier if I didn’t know the other guy is probably in a hospital somewhere,” Foggy says.

Matt gives him a crooked grin. “It’s still a little funny, though.”

He feels heat by his shoulder, like Foggy’s reached out but decided against actually touching him. Which is unusual: their friendship has for years functioned on the assumption that Matt (a) doesn’t have the same rules about personal space, out of necessity, and (b) likes it when Foggy touches him. He shifts his weight so he lists against Foggy’s hand. “I’m gonna…”

“Call the DA’s office about Mr. Purdell’s bail.” Foggy shoves him upright gently and sticks his hand in his pocket. Matt gives him a quick smile. “The morning girl there thinks you’re cute.”

“I don’t think people find me nearly as attractive as you assume they do,” Matt tells him, but one of them has to make the call, so he goes into his office.

Karen comes in shortly after he gets off the phone. She flutters a bit, voice fluctuating and heartbeat a bit too fast, when saying hello. Matt cocks his head, but as far as irregularities go, it’s too subtle to ascribe to a particular emotion. Karen goes straight to her desk and unzips her bag; she withdraws crinkling newsprint and thrusts it at Foggy, whose chair creaks from him leaning on the front wheels too much.

“ _Daredevil Dares to Deface Cop_ ,” Foggy reads aloud. “Defender of our home beats one of NYPD’s own — what?”

“What did he do?” Karen asks Matt. She curls in on herself, lines of heat containing themselves in Matt’s sensory field.

“He got as good as he gave,” Matt tells her, glowering.

“You realize how bad this makes you look, right?” Foggy asks. “You can’t just go beating up cops ‘cause they’re shitty people. That’s not how life works.”

Matt gives him a resigned little laugh. “How does it work then, Foggy? I just walk by because I’m afraid people won’t like me?”

“I pretend I don’t see a lot of things, Matt, but this isn’t about being a good Samaritan. It’s about not antagonizing people who can turn the city against you. Again.”

Matt opens his mouth. “Don’t hurt them in places that photograph well,” Karen says before he can speak. Foggy twitches. “There’s a headshot of the officer in a hospital gown with stitches all over his face. He looks pathetic,” she says, with venom in her voice that Matt can practically taste.

Matt knows that she’s right — it makes sense no matter which way he slices it. “I’ll keep it in mind,” he allows.

Foggy inhales; Karen places a hand on his shoulder, and he relents. They say no more about it.

~~*~~*~~

Matt doesn’t preoccupy himself unduly with occasionally off-beat behavior from his friends; they are, after all, only human, and he has other things to worry about. 

The accumulation of off-beat moments over the course of the next two weeks, however; that, he notes. It’s all small things: Karen leans on Foggy, not the back of his chair, to read over his shoulder. She goes to have lunch with Doris Urich later that week, and the office feels strangely empty with just Matt and Foggy in a way it hasn’t before. Foggy mentions the quiet, skin temperature rising and heartbeat quick like he’s afraid to bring it up. 

“I don’t think she’s abandoned us forever,” Matt says. “She left her computer on.”

“Yeah, obviously. Just saying.”

Matt has years of experience picking up when Foggy has a thing for someone, and by now, he’s pretty sure that there’s something there for Karen. The thought makes him strangely uncomfortable; he’s never had an issue with Foggy dating a mutual friend, but this is different, something new in a three-person dynamic instead of four-five-six people with room to spare if Matt gets temporarily sidelined.

On the other hand, Foggy isn’t any less enthusiastic about seeing him. If anything, he seems to be trying to tone down his enthusiasm: diffident voice at odds with the happy jump in his pulse when they’re talking. He’s never hidden his feelings before (see: every time he’s ever told Matt that he’s a delight or an asshole or his favorite person at Columbia) and Matt isn’t an idiot.

“I hate to ask, but are you all right?” he says, three drinks in at Josie’s.

“Yeah,” Foggy says dubiously, like he’s not sure why Matt’s decided that this is a question that needs asking. “Why, should I not be?”

“No, no, not at all.”

Matt tries to make himself shrug it off. It’s not like his friends have suddenly been replaced by pod people, or alien replicants. He should save his energy for the bigger mysteries, the ones that are bigger than him. Foggy still heckles him and makes disapproving noises about his injuries and brings enough lunch for Karen to steal his leftovers. Karen still holds herself brittle when no one is looking, but there’s more give to her, now, and Matt is less afraid that she’s going to break without telling anyone.

~~*~~*~~

Matt finally gets something to push the off notes of his personal life from the foreground of his mind when he and Foggy get a chance to visit their client Elena Guzman and the sister with whom she’s been staying. They take her out to lunch — which means, as Foggy says, that they blow big bucks at the diner four short blocks downtown from their office. Matt lays out his notes while Elena’s son breaks out in random giggles.

“You’re making faces,” Matt says to Foggy.

“What makes you think that?” Foggy says. His voice comes out nasally and warped. Matt raises his eyebrows.

Large quantities of salty food having been ordered, they discuss the specifics of the case. The restraining order that they filed — “I say ‘we’, mostly I mean our secretary, Karen,” Foggy points out — went through over the weekend. It doesn’t mean that everyone will be safe, but it does mean that they can pursue legal action if her boyfriend comes near them again. Matt advises her to take photos and document every instance of contact. They leave agreeing that the meeting was, if not ideal, then at least a step in the right direction for everyone.

Back at the office, Matt pulls up a file on his computer unrelated to work. The woman the pier guard had been meeting with had only been able to give him her occupation — waste management — and the name of the man who’d contacted her about the rubble in the containers — Leo Holmes. A search for his name had turned up almost nothing: a Linkedin profile for an architectural engineer in New Jersey, an article about the same man graduating from Boston University. Not a suspicious lack of information, but not a lot to go on, either. He pulls up the photo from the LinkedIn profile and shows it to Foggy.

“Unrelated favor to ask: can you tell me what’s in this photo?” he asks.

Foggy hesitates. “What do you want to know? It’s a business-card type photo of a guy. He’s not much to look at, and kind of old for you.”

Matt recognizes that tone, although there’s a sour note to it that’s unfamiliar, and laughs. “I’m not going on a date, I’m looking for information,” he explains.

“Case-related?”

“Spare-time related.”

Foggy huffs. “Course it is. Well, he’s got a buzz cut, suit and tie, kind of stringy-looking. Looks like he graduated high school in ninety-five, so … thirty-eight, thirty-nine years old.”

“Any hobbies listed?” Matt asks, even if it’s information he could easily read himself.

Foggy bends over him to reach the keyboard, heat from his body warming Matt’s face. “Golfing, chess, skiing. Don’t get yourself beat to death with a golf club, that’d be embarrassing for all of us.” His pulse picks up as he says it.

Matt leans in to headbutt him gently. “Thanks buddy. I’ll do my best.” 

~~*~~*~~

Foggy asks Matt if he wants to take a walk on a day that it is mildly more clement than every other freezing day in January so far. Matt initially says no, but Foggy sounds so disappointed that he relents. It doesn’t have to be a complete waste of time (not that any time spent with Foggy is a waste, not really, but why miss a day and an opportunity? He casually mentions an overpriced cupcake shop there that smells good; maybe Foggy can buy him something, he suggests.

Foggy is already bouncing on his toes and brighter than almost everyone around him when they meet up; Matt locates him and takes his arm without any hesitation.

Matt suggests that he and Foggy take a walk, since it’s late enough that they’ve already closed up the office. Foggy seems to be pleased by the idea. They walk and talk about other things: [list]. Foggy pulls one end of his scarf out from under his coat and wraps it around the hand that Matt has on his elbow. Matt protests that it isn’t necessary, but it’s the scarf that Foggy’s aunt made out of wool from (presumably) the world’s most well-insulated sheep, and it actually helps quite a bit. It also has the side effect of warming the rest of Matt too. That part doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t last for long, but he appreciates it all the same.

They head into a certain part of town; Matt can tell by the specific noises and the smell of a particular restaurant. His heart beats faster; he goes quiet and lets Foggy chatter, but he tunes him out because the hunt is on. There are lots of administrative buildings around Manhattan, but this particular one is in between Korea Town and Chelsea. Matt doesn’t know what Reynolds’ voice sounds like, but he can listen for his name, for anything that would indicate interaction with other people. He lets Foggy guide him and devotes the entirety of his attention to the faint vibrations inside the building. Matt can hear and smell the people waiting in line inside, and the wisps of stale air that they carry with them as they exit, about a block before they turn the corner and Foggy says, “Matt…”

“Let’s go down this way,” Matt says, pointing.

Foggy stops in the middle of the sidewalk. Matt keeps walking for a few paces. His hand is cold again.

“Hey Matt,” says Foggy. “This trip doesn’t happen to coincide with Andrew Reynolds’ address, does it?”

Matt navigates through the slush back to his side. He ruffles the back of Foggy’s hair, and regrets it when static crackles against his hand. “Come on,” he says. “What am I gonna do?”

”Case the joint now, hang out with me, and then stalk the guy so you can beat him up one dark night and step on the fingers he still has,” Foggy reels off. “Maybe even the ones that Elena hacked at, if he says something that pisses you off enough.”

Matt opens his mouth to quip back, and then shuts it. He pulls his scarf up over his cheeks and nose so that Foggy won’t be able to see the flush — or the grin — he can feel spreading across his face. “Aw, you do know me,” he says, taking Foggy’s arm again and hugging him close.

“Boy do I ever,” Foggy half-sighs. He sounds resigned. “I also happen to be a lawyer, who is working to build a case, and I’m telling you, you’re not allowed to touch this piece of human garbage until after the trial.” He closes his free hand over Matt’s fingers. “You pick up where the law leaves off. Give the law a chance to actually get this one first, okay? Let me buy you an overpriced cupcake instead.”

~~*~~*~~

The week before Elena goes to trial, Matt goes out tailing the chain smoker from the pier, follows him fruitlessly until the man passes out in front of the television, and breaks up a mugging in progress on his way home. He crawls into bed immediately; his glasses are already on the bedside table when Karen calls.

“I don’t want to lose Foggy if I tell him about what I did,” she says, as soon as he lifts the phone to his ear.

Matt takes a second to get with the program: Karen, her uncomfortably comfortable relationship with Foggy, the conversation at the bar about which they must never speak. “I lied to him for years,” he offers. “About — well. Not categorically worse, but bigger.”

“Okay.” She breathes in deeply, holds for a second, and exhales away from the receiver. 

He waits, but she doesn’t say anything else. “That it?”

“Sorry. I was watching some weird things on Netflix. They, um, there were a lot of cute animals. A baby elephant shrew died.”

Matt frowns. “Is everything okay?”

“Can you come to the farmer’s market with me tomorrow morning?” she asks, instead of answering. “I’ll pick you up at the C and E stop on 50th if you need help navigating the MTA; or not, I guess you don’t—”

“No, I’d like that,” Matt says. “If you met me. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

~~*~~*~~

He probably shouldn’t be surprised by the number of people at a winter farmers’ market, but he is, and he shuffles closer to Karen as they step inside. “I don’t do as well with indoor crowds,” he explains to her, when she turns her head sharply to look at him. It requires extra effort to focus on her in the midst of an overwhelming amount of sensory input from the surrounding area. “If I lean on you more than usual, that’s why.”

“Sure,” she says. “Let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

She grabs a basket, and they stroll through the market. Karen hovers over wooden crates full of tomatoes; they appear to be making her anxious, though she’s been twitchy and quick all morning. Matt keeps his hand on her elbow while he makes small talk with the man selling cucumbers at the next table.

Karen’s pulse goes up; he can feel it under his fingers. “Hey, Matt,” she says, still bent over the tomatoes.

“They all smell basically the same,” he says.

“Um … yeah. Thanks,” she says. She grabs two, pays for them, and they move on.

Five minutes later, walking away from a table of peppers: “Hey, Matt,” she says, more quickly this time. “You think we fucked up a little?”

“Nah; you can do a lot with tomatoes and peppers,” he says. “So I’ve been told, anyway.”

“I mean — Foggy’s good. He’s not like you and me.”

“Oh.”

“I think we made things weird. Recently. Or, Foggy and I did. Oh — spinach, I need spinach, on the left.” Karen does an about face, dragging Matt after her. “And I keep thinking, I need to tell him, he needs to know, because — god. He looks at me now like he thinks I’m good.”

“You’re talking about New Year’s,” Matt realizes, scalp prickling.

“And Fisk before that, and Señora Cardenas, and then there was Marci and that was nice for him but.” Her register drops on the last word, and Matt snorts quietly as he remembers his conversation with Foggy on that subject.

“It doesn’t have to be … difficult. You and I, we’re fine.”

“Of course, but we don’t have the same relationship.” Karen sticks a plastic bag of leaves into his hands. She turns away and opens the clasp of her wallet.

Matt waits with his heart beating hard for her to finish her transaction before he answers. “You’re worried he’s going to dump you?” he asks, and he knows exactly how to posture and tone himself down so that he doesn’t look like he’s pushing her into answering one way or the other.

“There’s nothing to dump — but. Maybe.”

Matt quiets for a few seconds. “I’m trying to think of the last time that Foggy dumped anyone outright. He usually either gets dumped or lets things trail off, in my experience. Well, besides me.”

A sharp, unmistakable skip of her heartbeat. “Wait, sorry, were you two…?”

“No, never, I just meant when he,” —

“Right.” She swallows loudly enough for him to hear it, and feel the heat rise in her cheeks. “Can we get out of the way of everyone? There’s a bench over in the — nope, never mind, a couple of jogger just sat down. Let’s just go stand to the side.”

“Sure. You planning to start something?” He clutches their vegetable haul and his cane close to his chest. Casual, casual.

“Not necessarily. I can be happy without sleeping with my boss,” is her answer, even though Matt could list the ways she continues to be unsettled by her posture and the shape her words cut through the air when she speaks. She pulls him around a corner that smells like pumpernickel over to the fishy part of the market (Matt tries not to think about the squelch underneath his shoes.)

“Sorry. I didn’t mean,”—

“I don’t have anyone else besides you and Doris to talk to about this,” she adds. “Sorry.”

“What does Mrs. Urich say?” Matt asks.

“She hasn’t had a good day in a while.” Karen ducks her head.

“I see.” He hums. It helps to tune out the rest of the room. He remembers that when he needed her, she hugged him, maybe he should do that, and he puts an arm around her shoulders. “Foggy Nelson’s righteous anger is one of the worst feelings in the world,” he tells her.

Karen leans into him. “Worse than your ‘car crash’? Air quotes around ‘car crash’.”

Matt tilts his head. “Almost. While it lasts.”

“That’s really comforting.”

“Being comforting isn’t a skill I’ve worked to hone,” Matt tells her.

“Yeah, you grew up a lone warrior, I know,” she says. 

A wave of indignation rises up in him, but he stomps it down. His pride needs to be less important than his friends, or what’s the point? She sounds more grounded when she’s teasing him. “I was _going_ to say, it’s the worst feeling while it lasts, but it won’t last forever. Probably.”

Karen squeezes his arm. “No, still not very comforting.”

“Sorry,” he mutters.

“But thanks for trying.”

~~*~~*~~

Elena Guzman’s case goes to trial in February, the first week of Lent. For the first time since they’ve opened the firm, they _lose_. The judge reads the sentence, Elena starts to cry, and Foggy lets her grip his hand tightly. Matt’s skin goes numb, his hearing unfocused. Air currents brush meaninglessly against his body, and when he stands up, his hands shake so badly that the tip of his cane skitters on the hardwood floor. He accompanies Foggy as he delivers Elena into the tearful, incoherent arms of her sister and brothers and aunts and friends for the few moments before she is taken away. Then, her family has nowhere concrete to focus their grief.

“Please tell me they’re not thanking us,” Foggy mutters to Matt.

“You did your best, and we can’t thank you enough,” Matt translates through gritted teeth.

He drags the giant blank space of his awareness together long enough to tell Elena’s aunt that yes, _claro que podemos discutir el proceso de apelar, cuando quiera Señora Guzman_. He gives someone — one of Elena’s sisters, maybe — his card, takes her hands between his even though they can’t press as firmly as they should. Then he lets Foggy haul him out of the courthouse.

For a few minutes, Foggy’s grip digging into his forearm and the _tap-tap-drop-tap-tap-drop_ of the cane as they descend the steps outside are the only things that really register; and for the space of time between the flat of the sidewalk and the short drop of the curb, Matt feels like he’s nine years old again, just barely able to extract meaning from the overwhelming sea of noise and smell and texture.

They walk without conversation, nothing but Foggy’s occasional “red light, stopping here” and “hang on, let the field trip kids go by” to break through the fog. In between, Matt hears the judge’s voice in his head, over and over as she reads the sentence, and Andrew Reynolds’s drawling, smirking tone on the stand.

“Matt. Hey. Earth to Planet Murdock.”

“Hm?”

“Coffee.”

Matt blinks; breathes in macaroni and cheese, barbeque sauce, frying oil, stale coffee, and vinyl seats with plastic stuffing. A woman in high heels and lilac perfume approaches them; she maneuvers them into a booth and slaps a menu in front of Foggy. She hesitates in Matt’s direction. “He’ll read it to me, don’t worry,” says Matt, gesturing across the table to Foggy.

He drops the smile as soon as she leaves. Foggy’s shirtsleeves slide along the table, like he’s about to reach for Matt, and then stops. “We’re going to appeal,” he tells Matt. His voice is hard and focused.

Matt carefully leaves his hands folded on the tabletop. He nods. “We’ll broaden our argument, search for other successful appeals. There was a similar case in Florida last year, I’ll put Karen on it tomorrow.”

“Karen needs to finish filing for the Purdell case, remember? Deadline’s on Friday. I’ll start it, see if I can get the transcripts. We’ll work backwards from there.”

“Of course. Sorry, I guess I’m not thinking very clearly right now.” Elena has a daughter, two years old, who’s going to have to stay with her aunts and uncles. Reynolds hadn’t spoken directly to the girl in court, but Matt could smell the fear on her.

“Uh-huh,” says Foggy, and nothing more.

“You’re staring at me, aren’t you?” Matt asks. “You’re doing the thing — you don’t move as much.”

Foggy draws a breath to speak, but the waitress comes back before he seems to decide what to say. “Two coffees, one black, one with milk,” he says instead, still facing Matt. “And … bacon. Sausages. Side of fries. Thanks.” Once she’s gone, he says, “Sorry, did you want something else? I just picked the first couple of things I saw…”

“It’s fine.” Matt waves a hand. Elena is still helpless in his mind’s eye; the scene of the trial filled in by voices, shoes, heat behind him and the jury off to the right. Reynolds describing how it felt to see his fingers lying on the kitchen counter. _Sausages_ , Matt thinks suddenly, and swallows past his heart beating too fast in his throat.

“So,” says Foggy, after a minute and a half of what Matt supposes is awkward silence for him. “Got any plans for tonight?”

 _No_. The lie comes easily to his tongue. He keeps his mouth shut, and gives a noncommittal shrug instead.

Foggy runs his fingers through his hair. “You’re gonna go beat up Reynolds, aren’t you.” Matt turns his face to the window. Foggy lays his hands over Matt’s and gives him a shake. “Don’t. Okay? Just don’t. Don’t fuck this up any more than it’s already fucked.”

Matt is spared from answering by the arrival of their coffee. Foggy withdraws his hand and lifts the mug to his lips.

“I wouldn’t go near Reynolds until after the appeal is over,” he tells Foggy.

“You’re real generous.” 

“I know,” Matt says quietly. He doesn’t want to upset Foggy more, not right now. He’s let down enough people for today. 

Foggy turns inwards — the direction of his breathing and the swing of his hair, the way that the seat cushion squeaks under him as he pulls himself in — and takes out his phone. Matt lets his mind go blank. He doesn’t ask what Foggy is doing, what he’s thinking. He’ll tell Matt when he wants to.

They’re silent until their waitress returns, bearing greasy and unappetizing platters. Matt is already faintly nauseated from the rest of their day. Diner breakfast for lunch sounds like a shitty idea.

Foggy’s fork clicks on the plate as he slices through the sausages. “You talked to Rafa lately?” he asks, breathing processed meat and syrup all over the table.

“What. Who?” Matt scrambles for names of clients, police officers, anyone who might be useful to Elena, lands on that one mortician he dated for a whole three months last year, and why would Foggy bring that up now?

“Rafa from down the hall, not the hot one,” Foggy says, probably reading his expression. “We had like three classes with him, come on.”

“Oh, that one.” He frowns at Foggy. “Not since … November, I think. Why?”

“We’re meeting him and Katrina tonight at an actual bar — Rafa wants to do Tia Pol ‘cause he forgets we’re not all swimming in divorce attorney fees — and Brett may make it out, but it’s Brett so who knows? Katrina is coming too, that’ll be nice and awkward. Marci’s on a _date_.”

Matt pictures sitting at a restaurant with friends (mostly Foggy’s) from Columbia when he’s got an appeal to build and a city full of crime that he can prevent before it gets to the point of trials and bullshit convictions. The fries he’s chewing go dense and mealy in his mouth. “You should go see them. I’m going to — I’m going home after this.”

“Really,” says Foggy. “You gonna stay there? Or are you gonna put on your horns and I’ll pretend like I don’t know where you are when everyone asks?”

Matt pulls off his glasses and raises his eyebrows. “You want me to lie to you?”

Foggy’s heartrate kicks up a notch. “I want you to come to Tia Pol with me and leave Hell’s Kitchen to fend for itself for one night.”

“I need to…” Matt clenches his hands into fists, pleading for Foggy to understand.

“Yeah, well, I need my best friend, because this sucks,” says Foggy, voice cracking, and Matt looks, really looks at him for the first time since Elena’s sentence was read.

“I’ll come,” he says quietly, and forces a weak smile onto his face. “I’m sorry. I’ll come with you.”

“Thanks,” says Foggy. He sounds so painfully relieved that it makes Matt’s insides squirm with guilt.

Matt reaches out and stabs at the cooling sausages on Foggy’s plate just to distract them both. “Here. I’m gonna throw sausages at your face, I need to at least get in some practice if I’m not going out tonight.”

“Liar,” says Foggy, but he opens his mouth wide. Matt hits him on the nose on purpose.

~~*~~*~~

It isn’t _quite_ as awful as Matt had imagined. Mostly, he leans against Foggy in their restaurant booth and makes him do the talking. “I’ve spent most of my time with the best lawyer in Hell’s Kitchen since we graduated,” he says, elbowing Foggy in the ribs. “He can tell you any story you want better than I can.”

“Brett says you’ve met Daredevil,” Rafa says. Next to him, Foggy starts to sweat. “That’s pretty cool. I’ve seen Iron Man flying over the city, but he doesn’t exactly lay low.”

Matt waves it off. “It wasn’t much more exciting than that.”

“Yeah, especially not when we have a real live hero right here with us,” Foggy says loudly. “I mean, Sergeant Mahoney’s only real superpower is being devastatingly handsome, but hey, that’s more than most of us can say, right?”

Matt’s fingers tighten around the grip of his cane, and he smiles in Brett’s general direction. “Giving out parking tickets and making coffee counts as being a hero these days?” he asks — and everyone jumps on the new topic, forcing Brett to defend himself and letting Matt sink back into the booth and breathe for a little bit longer. 

~~*~~*~~

He goes out the next night instead, follows Leo Holmes home to the roof of his apartment in Chelsea. He waits until night has completely fallen, then climbs up and ducks down in the corner of the balcony until the man’s footsteps move into the bedroom and there is silence from within the apartment. He picks the lock on the balcony door, steps inside, and looks around. The air inside is still, making it harder to get the lay of the apartment. The floor is hardwood, there’s the electric hum of a fridge to his right, and the man had gone straight to the bedroom. Matt goes left, running gloved hands along the wall. He reaches a bookshelf, notes the small plastic figurines on the middle shelf, and then the bedroom door opens, and all hell breaks loose.

Matt ends up on Claire’s couch an hour later, with an ice pack on his ankle and his shirt on the floor. It’s not particularly bad this time, at least in Matt’s opinion — although, as Claire points out, his pain scale is completely fucked. “I thought the new suit was supposed to prevent this sort of injury.” She dabs at the gash in his forearm with alcohol-soaked cotton. “What kind of knife was it?”

“No idea,” he tells her, suppressing a hiss as the gauze strays into the open wound. “It had a narrow blade, and it sounded different. Different alloy, different metal, maybe just a different temper. Or none of the above.” He’d know it again it he heard it, the vibrations against the bone of his arm and then against the concrete floor.

“With your luck, someone’s found a new source of vibranium. You don’t still have it, do you?” 

“I, uh, I threw it in the river. I don’t know. What’s vibranium?”

“You mean there’s something the great Daredevil doesn’t know?” she asks, a wry smile in her voice.

“It’s been known to happen,” he says.

“It’s, um. Captain America’s shield, that’s what it’s made out of. According to the comics, anyway.” Claire puts down the swab and fishes around in her kit until she comes up with surgical thread: something Matt used to be able to intuit not because he heard the shape, but because this used to be the part where her heartbeat went up. He’d concluded that it wasn’t the prospect of stitches themselves, but specifically, stitching him. In his more honest moments, he would admit to an insidious pleasure at the reassurance that he still merited the reaction. It’s become less important, lately.

“You don’t strike me as the comic book type,” Matt tells her. “My mistake.”

“Not really. I just had a crush on Steve Rogers. Before he came back to life.”

“I’ve been told he’s still hot,” Matt says.

“Your sources are accurate. Hold still, I’m gonna start with the stitches.” Claire pinches the wound shut with one gloved hand, and Matt feels a sharp, dragging pain at the edges of the skin. “I was _going_ to say that you should bring it to your armorer, if you still had it.”

“Next time,” Matt says through gritted teeth. “How’s vibranium made, anyway?”

“Do I smell like an engineer to you?” Claire asks. “Hold still, I’m gonna start with the iodine. What do you think is going on?”

“I still don’t know. Looks like a group of people shipping something, but it’s just debris, rocks … maybe some kind of ore.”

“Whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll manage to end up in the middle of it,” Claire says.

“Is that meant to be a warning?”

“It is what it is. You are who you are. There you go.” She finishes and clips away the extra thread. “And who you are needs to watch where you stick your arm for a while. No matter how much you like beating up criminals.”

~~*~~*~~

Foggy comes in the next day smelling like Starbucks coffee and the subdued sweet scent that Matt associates with stress. He heads over to Matt’s office, shuts the door, and stands in front of the desk.

“Are you firing me?” Matt asks, inanely.

“Thanks for not going on a murderous spree the other night. I appreciate it,” says Foggy. The words sound pained, because Foggy is a good person and Matt doesn’t deserve his understanding.

 _I’m just really good at hiding the bodies,_ Matt almost says. He thinks better of it. “I thought about what you said. Figured it couldn’t hurt to work on other projects instead,” he says.

“I really don’t want to know. But I really think we should talk about how we’re going to handle Elena’s case going forward. I’ve never actually done an appeal like this before, but I had some ideas while you were out jumping off rooftops and saving babies, or whatever it is you do.” His voice vibrates with focus and self-righteous frustration, and Matt latches onto it while he talks.

Foggy bumps Matt’s left arm the next day while they’re reviewing emails from potential witnesses — Matt on the Braille reader, Foggy on Matt’s screen — and Matt flinches.

“You hurt yourself?” he asks. His pulse jumps. He sounds tired.

“Claire fixed me up,” Matt assures him.

“Is it bad?”

Matt shrugs uncomfortably. “Yeah, it stings when you touch it.”

Foggy nods. “I nodded.”

Matt doesn’t lift his head, stays hunched over his desk. Foggy puts his hand on Matt’s shoulder. “This okay?”

There’s a bruise there, not too bad. “I’m not made of glass, Foggy,” he says.

Foggy drums his fingers on Matt’s shoulder. “So sorry, what’s wrong with me, worrying that my best friend might feel pain from a fucking stab wound…”

Matt snorts. “All right, all right. Here, read this, let me know what you think.”

~~*~~*~~

He’s on the roof two buildings from his apartment a week and a half later when his phone vibrates against his thigh. He calls back once he’s inside.

“Did you know?” Foggy asks without preamble. He sounds as though he’s been crying, maybe still is. 

The need to _fix things_ that Matt had just gotten out of his system enough to function comes roaring back. He bites it down again. “About what?”

“Karen.”

 _Oh._ That small detail. “Not at first.”

“When?”

Dread knots in his chest. “A few weeks after I told her about my … what I do. We had a pity party.”

Foggy snorts. “What, did you go beat up criminals together?”

“Foggy.”

“I know. That’s not fair.” He pauses. In the background, someone chastises her daughter in Italian — he’s on the street, then. “Where are you, are you at home?” Foggy asks.

Matt refocuses on the foreground of their conversation. “Yeah, I just got back. I’m fine. I’ll put the beer in the freezer.”

The doorbell rings barely a quarter hour later, just before Matt finishes putting away his uniform. He shoves the chest into the closet and goes to the door.

“That was fast.” He ignores the salt water and soap on his friend’s face. 

“I might’ve been on the way here when you called back. You couldn’t hear the cars, tell what street I was on?” Foggy’s voice is very nearly steady.

Matt steps aside to let him in. “I could tell you were on a street. That’s all,” he says.

“Seriously, Matt.”

“Sorry to disappoint.” Matt passes him a beer and sits down in the chair by the couch. It feels a bit like the one or two times that Foggy got seriously dumped, or when his grandmother had a stroke and he didn’t bother Matt about it because it was exam week. Just like then, Matt sits on a separate piece of furniture, sticking to this side of tipsy so he doesn’t say anything stupid while Foggy works himself up enough to talk.

After twelve minutes by Matt’s estimation, Foggy is still sprawled on the couch with his bottle half-empty in his hand. Several times, it seems like he’s about to speak, but nothing ever comes out. “You mind if I put on music?” Matt asks.

“No big band,” says Foggy. He sounds exhausted, like maybe he’s used up his last reserves of energy to forbid the affront to his senses that is Benny Goodman.

“No big band,” he promises. “Yo Yo Ma okay?”

“Sure. Knock yourself out.”

Matt drags his fingers along the spines of his CD collection until he hits the right one — half reading the labels, half listening to Foggy’s attempts to melt into the couch behind him. They listen to the energetic bowing of a string quartet without speaking; or, well. Matt listens. He gets the feeling that Foggy is somewhere else entirely.

Foggy finally speaks as the viola trails at the end of the third song. “I thought we were all on the same page,” he says. “With … whatever’s going on. Life.” He waves his hand. Matt isn’t sure what he’s talking about. “But it feels like you’ve gone down somewhere that I can’t follow, and I don’t want to follow. I don’t want to do what you guys do. I just want you back.”

Matt hopes it isn’t obvious how much it feels like he’s been punched in the stomach. He clasps his hands over his knees. “Foggy,” he starts, and nothing else makes it out of his mouth.

“I miss her.” He drops his hand onto the arm of the couch with a dull thump. “I used to miss you sometimes, too, after I found out. I want to go bitch about it to Karen, but I just saw her and she’s the only one.” 

“She’s still the same person you’ve seen every day for months,” Matt presses. It feels familiar: same lines, different subject.

“You think I don’t know that? That makes it worse. Matt, she killed someone.”

“In self defense. That’s not what I do, and we’re still friends.”

“I know. It’s shitty.” Foggy thumps his head against the back of the couch a couple of times. Matt pictures reaching out to cradle the back of his head, to keep him still. He doesn’t move. “You know what the shittiest part is?”

It’s not really a question. Matt turns to face him and waits.

“I’m angry at her. It’s not fair. You’re crazy, you’re fucking — whatever you are.” He waves a hand in Matt’s general direction. “Karen doesn’t deserve any of this shit, and I’m still mad at her because she’s not who I thought she was, and she told you, and she didn’t think she could tell me. I _hate_ that.”

Matt stays silent because the alternative is to press himself against Foggy’s side and tap nonsense in Morse code onto his arm. He waits, but Foggy doesn’t say anything else, just drinks his beer. Matt has plenty of time to reflect that this isn’t the most miserable or angry that he’s ever seen Foggy, which is good. (It would’ve been nice, says a small part of him, if Foggy had reacted so calmly to Matt being Daredevil. He bites down on that thought as soon as he recognizes it for the shameful selfishness that it is. Matt tries to be a good person, but he’s got the devil in him and he does what he can with it. He isn’t like Karen, who is also broken and imperfect, but not _wrong_ the same way that Matt is. It makes sense that Foggy would be quicker to see things from her perspective, even if he can’t forgive her yet.

Foggy sighs deeply and sets his empty bottle on the floor. “Thanks, man,” he says. His breathing has evened out.

Matt leans forward. “Stay here. You can take my room, just let me get some things out of it first.”

“Can I borrow some sweatpants?”

“Sure, in the closet.” He waves his hand towards his bedroom door. It doesn’t matter if Foggy goes through his things; it’s not like there’s anything Matt really bothers to hide from him these days, anyway.

After Foggy has crawled into Matt’s bed, Matt leans in the doorway to listen to him. His clothing is crumpled in the corner of the room, and the smell of Matt’s closet clings to him now. His breathing is quiet and contained, curled up into himself in the middle of the bed. It feels as though there’s something else Matt should be doing to help, but all he can think to do is stand and watch over him until he falls asleep.

“If you’re gonna be creepy, either get in here or close the door,” Foggy mumbles.

“Sorry,” says Matt, and, shutting the door, “Goodnight, Foggy.”

(Once he’s closed the door, he kind of wishes that he’d taken Foggy up on that offer. _Either come in or get out_ — although they’d shared a bed exactly once, when Foggy’s bed collapsed one night during their last year of law school. Matt had ended up on the floor under his own bed, while Fogy sprawled across the mattress above. It wouldn’t be a good idea in these circumstances.)

Before going to sleep, he hesitates for a minute or two in the living area, phone in his hand. He hits the call button. The phone rings, and rings, but Karen doesn’t pick up. He leaves a message instead.

“It’s Matt. Foggy’s at my apartment. I’m sorry. I’ll see you on Monday.” Then he drapes a blanket over himself and shuts his eyes.

~~*~~*~~

Foggy stumbles out of Matt’s bedroom mid-morning on Sunday, and Matt can tell the instant that he remembers why he’s here: his footsteps slow, and his breath catches in his throat.

Matt runs a hand over his shoulder and down his arm. “You look like hell,” he says gently.

Foggy wipes the back of his hand against his forehead. “Don’t tell me, I smell like despair.”

Matt tries to smile at him. “Coffee?”

“I want a beer,” he rasps.

Matt cringes inside. “Okay.”

“Should probably do coffee, though.”

Matt nods, stepping away towards the kitchen. 

Foggy follows him. “When I found out about you being Daredevil, I went to Josie’s and got hammered for like two days. Trying not to do that, I told her I’d stop using alcohol to deal with shit if she did.”

Matt doesn’t need to ask who ‘she’ is. “I’m sorry, Foggy.”

“Thanks.”

“I was thinking,” Matt continues, “after you went to sleep.” Foggy leans against the counter, which Matt takes as the most response he’s likely to get right now. “I’m going to the gym,” he says. “It doesn’t open until later today, we’d have it to ourselves for a while. Come with me.” It’s not enough, definitely less than Foggy deserves, but this is all he has to offer right now.

“You want to box with me?” Foggy asks. “Why?”

“You’d be surprised how good it feels to just hit inanimate objects sometimes,” Matt tells him.

“You’re not going to try to rope me into superhero-ing with you?”

Matt’s chest constricts so that it’s all he can do not to curl in on himself at the thought. “Never.”

Foggy considers it for a few seconds while the coffee percolates and bubbles in the corner. “Yeah, all right,” he says.

~~*~~*~~

Matt tried to teach Foggy how to box exactly once, during their third year of law school. He had quickly abandoned the idea because he couldn’t figure out how to correct and guide Foggy properly without giving himself away.

This time is different. This time, they get up on the mat, and Matt can tell him immediately whether his weight is distributed correctly, or whether he’s pulling back with the correct form, without having to pretend to feel his way around Foggy’s arms and test his balance with his hands.

“Why are we doing this, again?” Foggy asks.

“Because I don’t know how to make any of this better,” Matt says, wincing at his own honesty but unable to take the words back. “I can at least distract you.”

Foggy shakes his head, hair fanning out around him. Matt lets go of the tape he’s wrapping around Foggy’s hand to brush away the hair that’s fallen in front of his mouth. “Your distraction technique sucks, Murdock. Hurry up before I start thinking again.”

Matt holds back and sticks to certified boxing techniques. He lets Foggy get used to hitting him, feels an absurd bloom of pride when Foggy lands a punch to his shoulder that actually kind of hurts. (“Just don’t hit my left arm if you can avoid it, okay?” he says.) It’s a different way to hear his friend, to _feel_ Foggy’s frustration build and then dissipate through the contact of fist on the punching bag, the pad, his chest. Matt dances around Foggy, swinging at him with open hands, until Foggy’s movements begin to get dangerously sloppy. Then he darts forwards, hooks his back foot behind Foggy’s knees, and throws him down without ceremony onto the mat. Foggy grabs his wrist on the way down; Matt rolls with it, somersaults over Foggy’s head to break his hold and then he’s on his feet again, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

He holds out a hand to help Foggy up. Foggy wraps his fingers around Matt’s wrist. Standing face to face, Foggy panting with exertion, and Matt trying to keep his own breathing even, the mat creaks underneath Foggy’s feet as though he’s leaning forwards, and Matt _wants_ : he wants to kick Foggy down, knee to his side and arms twisted behind his back and then —

Matt takes a step back, heart pounding. “Break, or you want to go some more?” he asks. It almost comes out in a normal register.

“Break,” Foggy gasps.

They climb down from the mat and lean against the edge of the ring, passing a water bottle between them. Matt faces resolutely ahead so that Foggy won’t notice that he’s watching him as closely as he knows how, listening to his lungs expand and contract, imagining that he can hear the blood running through his veins. 

“This winding you?” Foggy asks. “Really?”

“What?” Matt tilts his head at him.

“You look, uh. Funny. I kind of figured if you run around rooftops all the time …” Foggy sloshes the water at him; he shakes his head.

“Just trying to make you feel better.” Because he _wants_ Foggy, and that’s not what Foggy needs right now.

“Weirdly enough, I do feel less like curling up in a dumpster and crying,” Foggy says.

“Hey, don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it.”

Foggy laughs. “Like I said — I don’t want that for any of us, even if I can only control _where_ I cry.” The faint, bitter scent of fear starts to come off of him again.

“Foggy, I’m sorry,”—

“Take it easy, it was supposed to be a joke. You remember those, right?"“Okay.” Matt makes himself laugh, too loud to really be believable.

Foggy starts to unwind the tape from his fingers. Matt almost reaches out to do it for him. “I think I’m done for the day. Can you do me a favor before I head home?” he asks.

“Anything,” Matt says, surprised at his own vehemence.  
“Call Karen and tell her we’re gonna be okay. Not … right away. But it’ll be okay.”

Matt wishes they were still up on the mat; he would tackle Foggy there, bury his face in Foggy’s shoulder and use the discomfort to keep himself from whatever searing, exhausted relief is running through him. “Yes. Yeah, sure, I can do that.”

~~*~~*~~

When Matt gets home, he takes a shower, ostensibly because he hasn’t taken one in two days, but also because it makes thinking easier. Here, he can think about boxing with Foggy. He takes the prickly crushing feeling off the shelf and examines it obliquely, until the knee-jerk fear subsides. He wanted to take Foggy by the hand and pull him down and hold him against the mat, lean close … and here his mind stutters out, chest constricting like he’s just been punched in the solar plexus.

His relationship with Foggy already involves a lot of physical contact, even aside from that which is necessary for him to get around in his everyday relationships. Up until last night, it hasn’t involved contact the way that he engages with people with whom he has the most intense relationships: physical violence and fighting.

It was a mistake. He knows that. He shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t have tried to drag Foggy down into the muck of his life any further than he already is. He’s been giving Foggy — and Karen, but his feelings about her are less complicated — access to that part of his life in a theoretical way, lately. It isn’t as hard to integrate them that way and still maintain some distance between his disappearances and the physical blood-and-guts. But this is the first time it’s been direct, all at once, and Matt —

—Matt likes it. He doesn’t want to fight Foggy, not the way that he wants to fight muggers and rapists. He wants to grapple with Foggy, meet him and match him and connect. He pictures going all-out, pictures Foggy being good enough for a knock-down drag-out fight of the kind that breaks furniture instead of friendships, and punches holes in walls, and ends by helping each other up and going down to Josie’s for beer, sharing a bench so that they can lean into each other.

Matt shudders, a fearful spasm that starts in his sternum and spreads to his whole body. He twists his fingers into his hair as he rinses it out, trying to let the patter of water against the shower curtain fill his mind and slow his jittery thoughts.

He loves Foggy. He has for years, and will occasionally tell him so if the conversation calls for it. It’s not the same as — as being … no. As wanting? That doesn’t sound any better. Feeling affection for his best friend is different from being in love with his best friend. Going by the prickling feeling up and down his arms and spine, and the weight in his stomach, somewhere in the last few months, Matt’s gone from one type of love to the other without thinking about it.

 _Shit_ , he thinks. He turns off the water and starts to dry himself off, shivering in the cold.

~~*~~*~~

He makes it through the rest of Sunday without panicking too much. He goes to Mass instead, and then puts on his newly repaired uniform. Arm be damned, and knife wound be damned, Matt is determined this time, too anxious and jittery to put up with sitting at home while he regroups.

He runs along the rooftops and down towards the piers without any interruptions. It’s on the trip down the pier that the back of his neck prickles, and he realizes that he’s being watched. The breeze off the Hudson River doesn’t part or curl around anything moving or person-shaped, but — there. The sound of someone breathing, barely audible even to him, in the narrow gap between one shipping container and the next. 

Matt pretends not to notice. He walks parallel along the top a few feet away. No movement. A little closer, and he’s downwind of them: better to pick out the shampoo they use, the wool lining of their clothing, the faint electric potential of a stun gun.

Matt has never had a good experience that involved a stun gun.

He makes a calculated leap between the containers; they’ll have to have seen him now. Ten seconds later, there’s movement in the air behind him and the vibration of metal under his feet, and then a whistling noise at ankle level. Matt jumps, tucking his knees to avoid the tripwire they sent through the air at him. Matt bares his teeth and whirls to face his opponent, escrima sticks in his raised hands, knees bent. His opponent is smaller than him, and lighter, but fast. As soon as his feet land, they’re on him — she, he can feel the curve of her body pressed briefly against his good arm, which she uses as a lever to launch herself around him. He ducks, hoping to send her tumbling off him on the rebound. She follows him instead, clinging to his back and throwing her weight towards his neck.

They grapple for maybe ten seconds before she realizes that his left arm is damaged — he lets out a cry of pain when she twists it hard enough to rip the stitches — and smashes it once before focusing on his other arm. Matt can’t tell what she’s doing, but he doesn’t particularly care: she followed him, she attacked him, he needs to subdue her. He throws her off; she jumps right back in, thin wire whipping through the air while he batters away her hands.

His opponent whips her wire through the air towards the ground. He jumps and flips forwards at her. As soon as he lands, she slams both of her palms over his ears with dizzying force.

Matt stumbles, temporarily disoriented, echoes making it hard to judge where she is. This time, when she goes for his ankles, she catches him. When he kicks at her with his free ankle, she just yanks him forwards, too close to do anything but knee her from on his back. She loops his ankles together and jumps onto his chest while he launches himself into the air. Matt wheezes and falls back on the top of the container. He hits his head, and his awareness doesn’t cut out, not fully, but there’s a split-second of disconnect that she takes advantage of.

She has his legs, and some of his air supply, but Matt manages to keep her from immobilizing him for a while after that — he loses track, just a long, losing thrash of limbs and mounting pain in his chest and arm. It ends with him on his back, wrists and ankles zip-tied to a strap on the container, with his opponent sitting on his chest. Matt breathes hard, every inch of his skin on fire with the devil and nowhere to go.

She strips off his goggles, then, with a little more difficulty, the mask, and everything abruptly goes cold. Matt makes a show of moving his eyes like he’s looking for a way out, finally settling on the region where her face must be, trying to control his fear. _Please, Father, let it be enough_.

She places her bare hands against his exposed face. “Breathe,” she orders him. He’s breathing too fast, it’s not helping anything. He shuts his eyes and does as he’s told.

“Daredevil, right?” she asks.

Matt doesn’t speak. He is too busy pouring his energy into slowing his heartbeat, stilling the fight-or-flight rush in his blood until it’s manageable again.

“Fine, don’t answer. Not like the horns don’t give it away, anyway,” she mutters. Her voice is low and vaguely familiar, but he can’t place it. She shifts her weight, letting up some of the pressure on his chest. Her knees still bracket his torso, a warning he doesn’t misplace. Matt takes a deep breath, opening his eyes as he does, and her breath hitches, surprised. She keeps one hand at the base of his skull while the other runs through his hair in a brisk, efficient fashion, nails scraping his scalp. Matt arches his back and twists, rolling his eyes back like he’s trying to see what she’s doing. 

“I’m checking for concussion. Take it easy, soldier,” she says. “Watch my finger.”

Matt tries to ‘watch’, he really does, but he’s been caught by someone with a voice he almost recognizes and she’s seen his _face_. His arm aches and her body blocks the wind, makes it too hard to tell where her hand is.

“Ah, shit. What day is today?”

“March sixth. What do you want?”

His captor swings her leg around so she’s sitting on his stomach and hip like a bench. “Okay, so maybe not concussed. That’s good. The Captain likes you, he’d be annoyed if I broke you. The question is, what are you?”

“Who are you?” he asks — gasps, more like. He knows her voice, he almost had it for a second…

“I currently represent the interests of the Avengers,” she says, and that’s when it clicks, and his stomach drops.

“Black Widow,” he rasps, voice carefully neutral.

“You’ve heard of me. That’s always nice. Listen, I just want to talk. I’m on your side.”

“Funny way to show it,” he says.

She shrugs, a movement he can feel in the shift of her body. “It’d be easier to have a sit-down conversation if I could look you up in the phone book.”

Matt rolls his eyes. “As far as anyone knows, you didn’t officially exist until recently.”

“Touché. My point is, You’re interested in protecting your territory. I can respect that.” He’s never met anyone who carries themselves the way that she does, coiled into herself with no extraneous movement. “But this one’s bigger than Hell’s Kitchen, and you need to let us handle it,” she continues.

 _Slim chance of that_ , Matt thinks. “They’re using my city, they’re counting on no one caring enough about the damage that you and your people caused for us.”

“What, superhumans? As you say over here, pot, meet kettle.” Matt frowns at her. “Buddy, I’ve seen what you do. It’s not the same scale, sure, but you’re not just a regular law-abiding man who goes around wearing bulletproof spandex, either. What I want to know is, were you blind before or after you started?”

A cold, hard weight settles in Matt’s chest that has nothing to do with the person sitting on him to hold him still. He opens his mouth, and nothing comes out.

Black Widow is very still; it’s hard to read, and disconcerting despite knowing that it’s intentional. “If you’re really interested in helping out in the future, we wouldn’t necessarily turn down the extra manpower,” she says. “But for this one, you just let our friends know that someone’s watching them. That makes my job harder. You understand?”

Matt forces himself not to grind his teeth. “Yes.”

“So you need to stop. This is an issue we caused — like you said. It’s our responsibility to fix it, and it’s your responsibility to clean up local messes.” Black Widow moves away, so that Matt can continue to struggle if he wants.

He doesn’t move.

“If you want to help in the future, you’d have to lose the mask, at least in front of us,” she drawls. “Can’t trust just any man in a uniform, these days.”

“I can’t do that.” “Then you can’t be a part of this. Not because I don’t believe you aren’t capable. Don’t make this some macho ego thing.” She holds up a hand – flat, the way the wind cuts around it from this angle, a placating gesture rather than an offensive. “We need accountability – you’ve seen the news, or heard it, anyway – and if you can’t provide that to the public, then you can’t work with us.”

Recent news, the Avengers … Matt puts the two together in his head, and comes up with the SHIELD implosion that Karen had gotten lost in for a few weeks when the data leak first happened. He bites down on his pride and his tongue. “What are they smuggling? Where is it going?”

Black Widow’s pulse rises by a fraction, observing him for a long moment. “Our debris. Still working on the ‘where’. We should be done in a few weeks, though. Should I contact you then, see if you want in?”

Matt shakes his head.

The tiny hesitation in her breathing disappears; the only anomaly now is her hair, ruffled by the breeze. “Okay,” she says. “If that changes, let me know.”

“It won’t change,” he tells her.

Black Widow shrugs. “If you’d asked me when I was a kid if I thought I was going to end up giving anyone with an internet connection access to my life history to save an American, I’d’ve killed you. Well, first I’d’ve tortured you until you told me what the internet is. Then I’d’ve killed you. People change. Don’t let me see you around here again. I know your face now; I’ve hunted people down with less information. It would be easy to connect your face to your mask for everyone to see. Got it?”

Matt bristles. “Yes.” 

“I’m going to undo your hands now. You can get the rest. Keep it, or don’t.”

“Leo Holmes, the man I fought last week,” he says. She pauses, leaning over him to get to his hands. “

Not useful to me, but he had a weapon that cut through my uniform.”

“Is that rare?”

“It’s a first.”

Black Widow nods. “You happen to see what it looks like, any other details? Or echolocate, or however you do what you do.”

Matt’s heart beats faster in his chest. “I —it happened too quickly to catch many details. Metal that I haven’t seen before. Straight blade. I threw it in the Hudson.”

“And the man?”

“Also in the Hudson. He was alive, though.”

“Got a description of him?”

“Short hair, taller than me, average size, Bronx accent. Probably has a broken leg.” Matt recalls hearing a snap at some point, but it was after he’d gotten knifed, and subsequently gotten angry, so he’s a little fuzzy on this point.

“Probably?”

“You know how it is.” He has no idea if she knows how it is. Matt never considered the possibility of actually having to meet _the_ Black Widow.

“Hm. Well. It was certainly interesting meeting you.” Black Widow resumes untying his hands. Matt sits up at once, rubbing his wrists. She places two objects into his lap: his mask and goggles.

“You too,” he says.  
“Catch you on the flip side. Leave it alone — remember, Daredevil,” she says.

~~*~~*~~

He forgets to set his alarm after he gets back, and so wakes up the next day to the insistent mechanical voice on his phone announcing that Foggy is calling him.

“You up yet?” Foggy asks.

It’s ridiculous, it’s absurd, that his familiar voice with its familiar early-morning combination of mischievousness and good humor startles Matt so badly now. He slides out of bed, one hand holding the phone while the other scrubs his face awake. He tries to grasp the fleeing remnants of a dream, but all he can remember is that Foggy was in his dream, too, holding his hand and telling him to jump into a ball pit with him. Matt flushes, even though Foggy can’t possibly see into his head. “Mn,” he says to real-life Foggy.

“There are honest policemen who patrol the area, you can take a couple days off in a row,” Foggy reminds him. “Just a little something to consider. You going to be on time to the office?”

“What time is it now?”

“Eight-ish.”

Matt holds the phone between his ear and shoulder while he picks out clothing for the day. “Yes. Why today?”

“Karen comes in at nine, too,” Foggy explains uncomfortably.

“Uh-huh,” says Matt. It takes him a moment to connect the dots.

In the end, he’s there only two minutes late, and Karen hasn’t even finished setting herself up for the day. The office is unusually silent. Matt doesn’t see that him mentioning it will make any difference, though, so he goes to his office and doesn’t stick his head out until he’s thoroughly checked his email and voicemail and responded to the ones he can on his own. “Foggy,” he says then, leaning out into the quiet towards the other office, “are we still meeting with Mr. Purdell’s sister this afternoon?”

“Two-thirty,” says Karen quickly. Foggy jumps at the sound of her voice. “She’s bringing the emails you were talking about on Thursday.”

“Great. Thanks.” Matt gives her a smile.

Absent the usual chatter that bounces around their suite and paints a constant image of locations, movements, and moods, Matt assumes it will at least be easier to read in peace, but he finds himself fidgeting before noon, zoning out as he half-listens for the crinkle of airplanes folded out of carbon paper, for Karen to push her hair back dramatically and sigh at her computer screen. He could just call it a day, walk over to Foggy’s office and sit on his desk. In his head, Foggy starts the conversation. _So about that time I kissed you, that was pretty good, huh?_

 _Yeah, I guess it was_ , Matt would say, like it only just occurred to him, too.

Then he shakes his head and tabs back a couple of sentences, fingers having skimmed over his reader without him paying attention at all. Later that day, alone with Foggy on the way to meet Miss Purdell, Matt tells himself it’s foolish to suddenly be so aware of holding Foggy’s arm when it’s something he’s done thousands of times before. 

Foggy shoves his hands into his coat pockets, mercifully oblivious to Matt’s internal struggles. “It’s not like she’s got a whole secret other identity,” he says. Matt stumbles for a moment, thinking he means their client’s sister, before he realizes that they’re talking about Karen again. “But I keep looking at her, and it’s normal, and then I remember.” He lowers his voice on the last couple of words, so Matt mostly picks out their shapes by the hissing of the ‘th’ between his teeth, and the hum of his ‘m’s.

“You can’t tell anyone,”

Foggy sighs. “I know, man, I know. It’s not that. I’ve made my peace with being a goddamn hypocrite. It’s more like … she’s the person I thought she was, but also not. It’s gonna be weird for a bit, you know?”

“You’re taking this well.” Matt is trying not to be bitter about this, he really is.

“What the hell else am I supposed to do?” Foggy says. He sounds exhausted, and Matt chastises himself for his own selfishness.

Between Foggy-and-Karen, and Black Widow, and Foggy, it feels like the only thing that’s really working in Matt’s personal life right now is his set of routes around Hell’s Kitchen every few nights. It isn’t complicated: either there are people he needs to protect, or there aren’t. His world can boil down to the _now_ , the immediate. A man drags his date behind a dumpster in an alley, while his date gives off sweat and adrenaline: Matt jumps down and separates them, waits until the woman has gotten well away before he lands a brutal frunt kick to the man’s gut, leaves him gasping and leaning against the grimy wall just to stay upright. Matt returns to the rooftops and bares his teeth against the freezing night air.

“You want to do something tonight?” Foggy asks in the afternoon.

“Sure,” says Matt, alert to the way Karen’s typing falters and then doubles down. They go out and drink and tell each other stupid stories, and Matt basks in the way that Foggy relaxes around him while conscious of how different he is at the office, ever since. It’s not exactly eggshells that he and Karen walk on, so much as it is a complicated dance of hurt feelings and continuing affection that grates at Matt’s skin with the wrongness of it all.

He waits to sober up before he goes out that night, but go out he does.

“You want to come over?” Foggy asks the next night, this time by phone.

“I’m going out,” says Matt. “I need to. I’m sorry.”

The following morning, Foggy smells like Marci and the floor of a bar, strong enough that even Karen lets out a distasteful huff of breath. “Did you sleep last night? You look awful,” she says: concerned, uncertain. Matt twitches.

“Yeah, of course.” Foggy sounds defensive. “Not, like, a lot, but I definitely used my bed for its intended purpose once I got there.”

“Three shots of tequila and a Guiness,” Matt chimes in, cheerfully hiding the bitter discomfort at the idea of Foggy being lonely without him. “Tequila knocks him right out, or it did when we were in college.” He turns to Karen, inviting her in on the joke.

Foggy shrugs, loose-limbed. Karen makes a disapproving noise.

Matt walks Karen back to her apartment after work on Thursday because she’s been unfocused all day, slamming the backspace button noticeably more than usual, and because Foggy ordered extra peppers for her salad for lunch the way she likes but never asks for and it’s putting them all on edge. Karen tells him about the cat her new neighbors have, and Matt wrinkles his nose for effect and tells her that he can smell it on her, yes. She giggle-snorts, and they move on to how on earth Matt ever gets things clean enough to not smell their histories (he doesn’t) and what he can tell her about their surroundings as they walk.

“Close your eyes,” Matt tells her. “I’ll guide us.”

“Okay, they’re closed.” She grips his arm more tightly.

“What can you hear?” he asks.

The ever-present wind of early spring lifts her long, loose hair. “Lots of footsteps. Cars on the road. I think — oops,” — she steps onto a crack in the pavement between the sidewalk and a tree, boot crunching the remaining slush — “people on bicycles?”

“How many?” Matt asks, smiling effortlessly.

Karen stills. Matt himself can isolate the sounds of two regular cyclists and one carrying pizza a half a block away from them.

“I have no idea. Ooh, but I can hear cars stopping, we’re at a red light on … our left. The traffic on Eleventh.”

“I’m impressed. Okay, okay, open your eyes, let’s cross.”

She loosens the death grip she had on his arm. “That’s what it’s like?”

Matt thinks about it. “Not exactly. My hearing is better than yours, and I can sort of … feel more things. Not more intense, just more of it. I can tell you there were three bicycles on our block just now, and point to where they are. But that’s the basic idea.” He says all of this as they brush past other pedestrians; then they catch up to a knot of people, and he falls silent. Even if he _knows_ they won’t be able to pick up his conversation the way he can hear theirs, it still feels like too much of a risk.

“When Foggy and I went to try to fix Señora Cardenas’ electricity, she gave us dinner,” Karen says. “I — this is probably so stupid, but I didn’t really know you then — I asked him to touch my face.” Her heart beats faster, sweat under her armpits marking her as nervous, not lying or angry. “Like you do, to see people.”

“Oh?” Matt forces a smile this time. Of course people are curious. Foggy asked a constant stream of questions about how to interact and whether this or that was okay, when they first met. He had been a little awkward about the whole face-touching thing, although that had been before they were close. Matt won’t let himself dwell on the slight discomfort of the idea of him and Karen playing around with it, not now. “Was it useful?” he asks instead.

Heat rises in her cheeks. “Not really. It was nice, though.” She shuts her mouth, a peculiar closed-off note in her voice. Maybe she sees something on his face. They walk for another long block with quiet between then, palpable even in the bustle and background roar of Hell’s Kitchen during rush hour.

“Sorry,” she says.

“What for?” he asks.

She jostles his arm. “Nothing. I mean, at least we’re all still together. That’s good, right?”

~~*~~*~~

“Again?” Foggy asks Saturday night, when Matt defers an invitation to meet up with some of Foggy’s friends from undergrad, owing to a prior engagement with the criminal element of midtown Manhattan. “Seriously, that’s what, the fourth night in a row?”

“Fourth? Fifth. I forgot to tell you about Tuesday night.”

“Dammit, Matt. What’s going on?”

 _I love you and I don’t know how to deal with it_ , Matt doesn’t say. Nor does he say, _I may have pissed off the Black Widow._ “You need to talk to Karen,” he tells Foggy.

“What’s there to talk about?”

“I don’t know. Her neighbors got a cat. Sports scores. Anything. I need a certain level of background noise in the office to work; it’s too quiet.”

“I don’t think Karen even knows what a football is,” Foggy says doubtfully.

Karen only reacts with irritation to football and soccer in the environment, but the one time their cab driver had the radio tuned to a baseball game, she’d gotten distracted a couple of times. “Ask her how the Mets are doing,” Matt suggests. “Please.”

“Promise me you’ll stay home tomorrow night if I do,” Foggy says. 

Matt quashes the automatic irritation at the attempt to hem him in. This is Foggy, who knows him and isnt’ asking him to stop forever; just one night, when they’re all a little more cautious with each other than usual. “I’m going to go to the boxing gym, then,” he says, letting his voice lift up like an invitation that he can’t bring himself to make explicit.

“You asking me to let you beat me up again? I had bruises for days.”

Matt recoils at the idea of Foggy being hurt, much less _by him_. “I’ll go easier on you. If you want to come along.”

Foggy sighs. “Sure, why not.”

They meet at night, and Matt shows Foggy how to stay light on his feet, guides his arms so that he punches straight and won’t break his thumbs. He weaves around Foggy, batting at him with hands that tingle where they touch skin, and Foggy eventually just gets annoyed and tackles him, arms around his waist. It’s _wonderful_. 

Matt may have a problem. 

~~*~~*~~

It’s probably the sort of thing that will upset Foggy if Matt doesn’t confess to him eventually, but there are some things he needs to sort out, first.

“What’s troubling you, Matthew?” Father Lantom asks, when he sits down on the other side of the confessional screen. Matt doesn’t bother to ask how he knows that it’s him.

“What makes you think anything’s wrong?”

“You rarely come to see me when nothing is the matter.”

“It isn’t the morality of life and death that brings me here today. I’ve … found a sounding board, of a kind,” Matt tells him.

“I’m glad to hear it. Too proud is the man who thinks that he can bear all of his burdens alone, with help from neither man nor God.”

Matt lets that sit between them while he gathers his thoughts.

“Bless me Father, for I have sinned,” he begins eventually, “It has been two weeks since my last confession. I have judged others.”

“What did you do?”

“I stopped them from hurting anyone else.”

“Matthew…” Father Lantom sighs.

“By putting them in the hospital,” he admits.

“I see. Anything else?”

“I lied by omission. I was selfish. I envy … other people who have more power and authority than I do.”

“Are you thinking of any specific people?”

“Yes.”

“What do you intend to do about it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had someone … like me … as a higher authority.”

“Interesting choice of words, ‘higher authority’. Do you not answer to the same Authority as everyone else?”

“I … haven’t thought about it before.”

“Maybe you should.” Silence. “For your penance, you,”—

“I want,” Matt interrupts, before he can lose his nerve.

“Yes?”

“A friend. I want him, and I want him to be happy but I want him.”

“Do you love him, or merely want him?”

Matt clenches his jaw. “Both.”

“Would he be unhappy if he knew how you felt?”

“It wouldn’t make his life any easier.”

“And you know this for sure, that you are such a burden that your love would make him unhappy.”

“Are you suggesting that I tell him?”

“I’m just asking a question, Matthew.”

“There’s someone else he loves. She’s a better person than I am. They would be happy together. I want them to be happy together,” Matt says, and it makes him sick how much he means it.

“How admirable of you.” There’s a note of amusement in Father Lantom’s voice.

“It’s not admirable, Father, trust me. I want him to be happy, I want him to be mine, but those aren’t things I can reconcile.”

“Would you allow me an observation, Matthew?”

“Yes, Father?”

“So far, you’ve only told me what you want; and that seems to me a greater sin than loving the wrong person. Rather than what you want, what does God want for you?”

“I don’t know.” Matt twists his cane in his hands.

“Then that seems to be a fitting penance. Pray one full rosary, and as you do, meditate on this; what does God want for you?”

It isn’t a question Matt has an easy answer to. He kneels in the pews long after he’s finished the rosary, until footsteps around the altar tell him they’ll be setting up for Saturday evening mass. He gets up, crosses himself, and walks past the slow footsteps of the elderly coming in to pray, barely taking note when he hits the soles of their shoes with his cane.

~~*~~*~~

One thing Matt does know: now isn’t the time to tell Foggy. Once he’s settled again, once he’s accepted that he’s the only one in their office who hasn’t committed crimes that carry lengthy prison sentences. In the meantime, Matt just needs to keep his feelings from coming to the forefront, and stop looking for excuses to touch him. 

Sunday night is the first warm night of the spring; so he dons his costume and is about to head to the piers when he remembers that that’s not somewhere he’s allowed to be right now. He sits on the rooftop, listening to the city for a bit, and wishes that Foggy was there to tell him about how the streetlights look or the colors of the neon signs. A voice in the back of his head that sounds remarkably like Stick tells him to quit feeling sorry for himself and go do what he’s supposed to be doing; so he stands up, stretches out, and jumps.

It’s a night that doesn’t end in bloodshed, either his or anyone else’s, and Matt should be grateful for the peace but his skin is still on fire and Claire is deep in REM sleep when he swings by her apartment for no other reason than that he wants someone to see him. He moves a couple of blocks over, so he’ll be less easily connected to her apartment complex, and sits on the fire escape of an apartment whose owners haven’t been home in a few days to call Foggy. It’s fine. It’ll be fine. He’ll rasp into the phone, and then maybe he’ll be able to go home and sleep for a few hours.

Foggy doesn’t pick up. Which, fair, it’s midnight and he’s been going out too much lately to make up for not spending as much time with Karen; he’ll crash eventually. Matt would have liked for him to hold out another night; but it’s probably for the best. What was it that Father Lantom said? _Are you a burden?_ Waking someone up because he can’t handle not having any targets on which to spend his restlessness isn’t helping anyone.

He meditates at home instead, stripped down to an undershirt and boxers, skin prickling feverishly with the urge to move, to hit. Let it in, let it in, and then … he breathes it out. In, and out again, the dull ache of past bone fractures and the tug of scars fading away.

“Foggy,” announces his phone.

The hard-won emptiness of his mind evaporates. Matt squeezes his eyes shut. “It’s after one,” he says, as he picks up the phone.

“You’re still awake,” Foggy points out. There’s a roar of noise in the background

“I don’t need to sleep as much.”

“Whatever. Sorry I didn’t pick up, we’re down at Josie’s.”

Some of Matt’s frustration dissipates. “You’re talking, then.”

“I’m learning so much about cats that I did not need to know,” Foggy says.

“Is that a metaphor?” Matt asks, wrinkling his nose.

Foggy sighs. “You know, I wish it was.” 

In the background, Karen coughs unconvincingly.

At the office, they still haven’t figured out how to chat easily amongst themselves while they work; but there are moments, points of brightness in which Matt’s insides don’t curdle with vicarious discomfort. Karen and Foggy snap at each other once or twice for reasons that aren’t readily apparent to Matt — about salad dressing, about whether or not Foggy’s proof makes sense or whether his grammar is going to undermine his argument — but it settles down quickly, and before Matt can step in to break the tension, it’s gone, evaporated into slightly stiff keystrokes and scratching of pen on paper.

They did say it would take a while. Matt wishes there was something, anything concrete he could to do accelerate the process. 

~~*~~*~~

On Easter, Matt wakes up early to attend the first mass at his parish that has a choir; the echoing spaces of the earliest, unaccompanied services just make him uncomfortably aware of his own voice mingling with that of the rest of the congregation. He goes to a café nearby afterwards, slowly sips his coffee and waits for his phone to ring. Karen said she’d be bringing Mrs. Urich to the cemetery, and did Matt want to join her? Somewhat to his own surprise, he found that he did.

The bell of the café door chimes, and Matt has to stop himself from lifting his head too suddenly as the smell of mid-range aftershave, ham sandwiches, and the underventilated air of Foggy’s apartment all hit him at once. He keeps his attention outwardly on his coffee until Foggy arrives at his table and taps his shoulder.

“Hey, buddy. Karen and Doris are across the street, you want to come? Karen was going to call, but then we saw you in the window first.”

“Foggy, I didn’t know you were coming.” Matt smiles at him, though not as hard as he’d like. He passes his drink to Foggy and takes his arm, adjusting his grip on his cane. Foggy is warm and familiar at his side, and with him, the prospect of spending time in the graveyard with the reminders of his and Karen’s failures feels like a little less of a hurdle to overcome. It feels obscene to be reassured in his duty by something so selfish as his attraction to a friend, but Matt’s resigned himself to worse earthly pleasures before.

Karen introduces them to Mrs. Urich, and then has to introduce them again. She quizzes her on their names and how they knew Ben until they arrive at the cemetery gates, when Mrs. Urich tells Karen to hush and stop treating her like an invalid.

“Yes, m’am,” Karen says at once, and she sounds strangely happy. It’s different than the way she can be around Foggy, or even Matt: not exactly childlike,more like the way Foggy talks to his nieces and nephew. It’s a good sound. 

Foggy takes over pushing Mrs. Urich’s wheelchair; first on the gravel path, and then over the frozen ground. Karen walks alongside Mrs. Urich, asking questions: currently prodding out the story of Mrs. Urich’s first date with Ben. Matt strays a little behind them.

Karen directs them to the tombstone; their conversation dies off as they draw close. She sticks close to Mrs. Urich. They are both quiet and possibly about to cry.

Foggy has a bunch of flowers that he adds to the ones that Karen and Mrs. Urich brought. They rustle sharply on the ice by the headstone.

Matt waits until he’s out of the way. Then he crouches down to the side and runs his gloved fingers over the stone, feeling for the engraved letters and trying to make out what they say. It’s been so many years since he’s seen the alphabet that it takes far longer than it would if he were reading stone Braille.

“Thank you for coming,” says Mrs. Urich. “Ben would’ve been happy to know he’d touched lives like that.”  
Matt nods. He’s mostly coming for Karen’s sake, because he loves her and this is important to her; but Ben helped him, he believed in him when the other press didn’t; and as far as he’s been able to figure out, Ben died protecting Karen from Fisk.

Either way he slices it, he owes this man a debt. He didn’t bring flowers. He goes back to the gravel path, in order to better find a pebble to place on the headstone. When he gets back, Karen is kneeling next to Mrs. Urich, holding her hand and resting her head against Foggy’s hip for support. Matt isn’t sure where he fits into this picture. Not at their side, not now. He stands behind the wheelchair instead. “The world hasn’t been the same,” he says, which is lame and inadequate.

They run into Father Lantom on the way out; Matt recognizes his footsteps from a dozen yards away. Matt waves to him, and his footsteps come closer.

“Good morning. Matthew, Mrs. Urich. I remember your face,” he says to Karen, “but not your name.”

Matt opens his mouth. “This is Karen Page. She knew my late husband,” says Mrs. Urich firmly.

Matt shuts his mouth and grins. He claps Foggy on the shoulder. “This is my partner, Foggy Nelson.” Saying the words feels daring, somehow, even though it’s absolutely true in the technical sense.

There’s a very slight pause, and Matt realizes that now he knows exactly who Matt was talking about during his last confession. As always, though, he gives no hint of what he has been told in confidence. “It’s a pleasure.”

They chat for a few more minutes. Then he turns to talk to Mrs. Urich and Karen. Matt deliberately doesn’t listen to what they’re saying. He’s pretty sure that Father Lantom would know and think less of him for it. Instead, he and Foggy stay a respectful distance away.

“He seems unusually observant,” Foggy says pointedly.

“He knows.”

“I need to stop being surprised that I’m not the first person you tell about major, relationship-changing things that you do.” Foggy sounds wry, though he tempers it with a hand between Matt’s shoulder blades.

“He figured it out on his own,” Matt says, but he’s grateful that Karen and Doris rejoin them at that particular moment.

“He’s a good man,” Mrs. Urich decides. “I was never one for church. Once I got married, I realized hey — no one’s making me do this! So I stopped going, just because I could. Then I met Ben, and we decided that we’d better get married in a church so his mother wouldn’t have a heart attack. Thing were different, in those days.”

Afterward, they take Mrs. Urich out to tea. She is quiet for most of the walk there. Matt holds onto Karen so that Foggy is free to push her wheelchair, keeping up a steady stream of amiable chatter. Matt hears the fragments of his should’ve-been-a-butcher story as they walk.

“I’m glad you asked us to come,” Matt says quietly to Karen.

“Me too,” she says.

~~*~~*~~

In early spring, they reach a quiet point: they’ve filed all the defense paperwork for the Purdell case, their latest two clients are still in the information-gathering phase, and they’re waiting to hear back from the judge whether or not they’ll be able to appeal Elena’s case. Foggy says that allergy season has made everyone is too miserable to commit crimes; Karen says they’ve gotten lazy about advertising their services. They’re meeting a potential client at noon; until then, Matt has committed himself to shredding papers because they appear to have acquired a machine that shreds papers, and he might as well use it. The task is relatively mindless, once he’s sorted which documents are important and which aren’t; and so he can let his mind wander.

Because he is paying attention to nothing in particular, he picks up the scent of the flowers before they reach the front door; although it takes a moment more to connect it to the sound of Karen’s distinctive stride. She fumbles a bit with the door, and Matt wonders whether he should help her; before he can straighten completely, the jamb jumps free, and the office floods with the peculiar combination of heavy sweetness and resin he had caught when it was down on street level.

“Whoa,” says Foggy. “Did I miss something?”

“No,” she says simply. “I’m just happy. I haven’t been in a long time, and I think I am now. Thank you both.” She bounces on the balls of her feet as she goes to his desk with the flowers. She places them down in front of him in a plastic vase full of water. “Foggy, you get gardenias. They looked friendly. If you don’t like them, I can always take them back and get something else for the office.” She pats the flowers, petals whispering against her skin, and pauses in front of his desk.

“That is completely adorable,” says Foggy, and if he were anyone else, Matt thinks he would sound sarcastic instead of charmed. “And I’m really glad that you didn’t get an actual potted plant with roots and everything because now I won’t feel bad when they’re dead in a week.”

Karen makes a small sound in the back of her throat, barely audible, but so full of delight that Matt stops feeding paper into the shredder so that he can observe her better. She glows with blood rising to the surface of her skin, down her arms and up her throat — a reaction that Foggy mirrors.

Matt bites down on his tongue to keep himself from grinning like an idiot.

And then he hears her footsteps approaching him, and realizes that she’s still trailing the resiny plant — significantly less pungent than the first — to his door. He follows her back to his desk, where she sets down another vase. “Geraniums. They’re sort of pinkish, and there’s purple in the middle of each petal, and they feel interesting.” Matt lets her guide his hand to the plant, which is sturdy and slightly sticky to the touch, consistency somewhere between pine sap and crystallized honey. He runs his fingers over the spines of the stem and strokes the leaves, which are stiff but cling less to his skin. Karen hovers, waiting for his approval.

“They certainly are interesting,” he says. “Thank you.” He smiles at her, and keeps on smiling. He wants badly to take her hand, communicate somehow — that he knows that there’s _something_ happening, here in their office and in their apartments and the many many spaces that they share, but Matt doesn’t have a great track record with communication or with relationships and has no idea what to do besides hurt people and pray; but Karen, she just sweeps in with loud energetic flowers that are a gift and not yet another responsibility for Foggy, and a plant that Matt doesn’t need sight to appreciate, and he loves her so _fiercely_ in that moment — 

— but she’s standing too still for him to find her hand easily, so he’d have to fumble, and it would end up being too much. “I’m afraid we still can’t afford to give you a raise yet,” he says instead. “No matter how interesting your bribes are.”

“I’d bribe you with alcohol, not flowers,” Karen says easily, and sits down at her desk.

“Oh, please do. I’m not saying it would work, but there’s no harm in trying,” Foggy calls through the open door of his own office.

Karen laughs. As Matt picks up another sheaf of papers to shred, he thinks that maybe they did miss something after all.

~~*~~*~~

Karen invites herself to Matt’s apartment soon after that. She won’t say why, but her timing gives him some idea of the general topic, even if he isn’t sure of the specifics. It feels a little like she’s going to ask his permission to take Foggy’s hand in marriage. “I brought pastries from the Italian bakery near my old apartment. Can we talk?” she says.

Matt stammers his acquiescence as he steps aside to let her in. “I’ve been told the billboard is mostly pink these days,” he says.

“It really is. Wow.”

Karen is both fascinated and repulsed by the billboard outside of Matt’s living room windows. This, in turn, fascinates Matt. “What’s it selling?” he asks.

“Women’s bodywash, I think. Lots of sensual soapy hands.” She leans on the creaky floorboard by the wall, craning hr neck and stretching her vocal chords as she does.

Matt takes the string-wrapped paper box from her hands. It smells like sugar and jam. He gets out two plates from the cabinets and sets them on either side of the box on the coffee table while they talk. The puffed pastries get powder all over Matt’s hands and stick to the roof of his mouth. Karen holds out a fluttering thing that turns out to be a napkin. She tells him about eating jam donuts with her parents on Long Beach Island when she was little, how her dad told her that if she didn’t wipe off the powder well enough, it would become a beard.

Matt hasn’t heard her talk about her family much and any information she gives about them seems to stop when she’s about fifteen. He doesn’t ask. She’ll tell him eventually, or she won’t. “Did you ever go to Coney Island?” he asks — safer ground, easy to skirt around their issues if she wants. “My dad and I went there a couple times. I remember being so afraid of not being able to find him, there were so many people…”

“Was this before, or after the accident?” she asks.

“Before. God, I don’t think I could’ve stood it when I was thirteen.”

“I can barely stand that place now,” Karen admits. She ducks her head and chews contemplatively on a cookie. Matt leans back against the couch and smiles at her. As he does, her heartrate picks up; she puts the cookie down on her knee. “I need to ask you something before I lose my nerve,” she says quickly.

Matt takes off his glasses and clasps his hands in his lap.

She takes a moment to gather herself, muscles coiled like she’s preparing to leap off the couch and flee. She tucks her hair behind her ear, and when she speaks, she talks to the floor near Matt’s feet. “When I was in college, my roommate in my junior year ended up dating this … I thought of them as an older couple, but I think they were only a year or two out of college.”

Matt feels his mouth fall open a little. He shuts it.

Karen laughs nervously. “I thought she was crazy, or part of a cult. It took a while for her to convince me that she wasn’t just helping one of them cheat, and they weren’t taking advange of her somehow. They were just happy together, all three of them.”

On an intellectual level, Matt knows that the ground is level beneath him, that he’s stone sober, that he is in fact sitting completely still. On another level, it feels like the couch is tipping him towards the floor, like the strangest spins he’s ever gotten. “What happened to her?” he asks.

“Oh…” Karen waves a hand, flicking powdered sugar into the air. “They broke up, she decided she didn’t want to move to Pennsylvania with them.”

Matt knows what he’s supposed to ask next, and it makes him jangle inside, his bones vibrating. He lets the silence stretch out between them while he takes deep, even breaths to control the sensation.

“Matt?”

Too long. He exhales. “I don’t have a great track record with relationships,” he admits. “My longest-lasting one was four months.”

“I can imagine the disappearing in the middle of the night to turn up with bruises might put some people off,” Karen says pointedly.

“Most of them. One just didn’t think I could be into her once I told her I’d dated men before,” says Matt. It feels good, if foolish, to say, like taking the bandage off a wound without being sure if it will hold or just split open again.

“Well, that’s bullshit. And…” She seems to reconsider whatever she was going to say, shaking her head a little. “Anyway I didn’t get it then, how she’d be happy with someone who wasn’t just hers, but I think I understand now.”

Matt nods. His head spins. The sounds of the city through the windows and walls fade away to insignificance. “We’re talking about Foggy, right.”

“You and me and Foggy, yeah.”

“Is there anything — you’re not — with him now, are you?” Matt asks.

“Not that I know of. And I know I asked you in January if you two were ever together. Is that still the same?”

“Yes.” Matt tips his face upwards and shuts his eyes, like he could make eye contact with her even if he wanted to. Beside him, Karen relaxes again, this time in a deliberate, piece by piece way: shoulders, hands, then spine. “But I’ve thought about it,” he adds.

“Oh.” A pause. She doesn’t move, but her voice shakes on that one syllable. “I wondered.”

“I’ve noticed, too. You make each other happy,” Matt says. He smiles.

“Right, and you’d have to be blind not to see the way he looks at you,” Karen blurts out; and Matt laughs, and laughs, until he falls sideways against her. The falling part could have been avoided, but Matt is light with relief. He laughs over her protestations that she didn’t mean it like that, Matt can read people practically as well as if he could see, so stop that, it’s just embarrassing and definitely not funny.

He quiets only after she’s stopped protesting. “I’m assuming that’s why you brought up your old roommate,” he says.

There’s a moment of silence, then, “I tried giving you a look. Yes, I want to — I don’t know. What do you think?” She asks the question the way she’d ask which days he’s available to meet with clients, brisk once more.

The concept is a new one to Matt, and he takes his time turning it over in his mind. “Like I said, I don’t have a lot of success with dating… but I think I want to try.”

Having said it aloud, Matt waits for the crushing swell of shame; and it comes, but lightly, just a sense of embarrassment that someone knows now, no pretending it never existed.

“Together?” Karen lays her hand on his leg, palm up. 

Matt takes her hand. “I think I’d prefer it if he dated both of us,” he says. The words taste strange in his mouth, sending his adrenaline spiking for daring to hope for so much. “I’m not always around.” _And I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around_ , he thinks, but doesn’t’ say. He’s not in imminent danger of bleeding out these days, but it’s only a matter of time. The idea of Foggy having Karen, if Matt doesn’t come back, is steadying.

“I think he’d prefer it, too,” Karen says with a laugh that brings Matt out of some dark future in his head and back into his apartment. Karen sighs happily. “I really like that man.”

The first time he’d sat here with Karen, she’d been stressed, dirty, scared and fighting to survive. They’re each harder now, in their own ways, but she’s not afraid for her life anymore, and she sits next to him and holds his hand like she belongs here. Even if this all goes sideways — if they’re both wrong about what they’re getting themselves into — Matt can say that they’ve gotten this out of it. This moment, this is good. 

~~*~~*~~

Talking about it with Karen is one thing; doing anything about it is another. The next time he sees Foggy at seven am on Tuesday morning, the shame he hadn’t felt at admitting his thoughts to Karen comes back, burning him from the inside out. He’s sure that Foggy will see, even though Foggy has historically not been very good at seeing Matt’s guilt written on his forehead like so much ash. (He has, in point of fact, failed to notice Matt wearing literal ash twice in their friendship, so.) All that Foggy says is, “Guess whose turn it is to go to the cigar shop?”

“Yours?” Matt says, arranging his features into an expression of innocence. 

“I walked past and they’ve got that scary dude with the septum piercing working today.”

Matt laughs, startled. “I thought — never mind.”

“What?”

“I thought you were attracted to him,” Matt admits. “The heartrate, the jumpiness…”

Foggy shrugs as he puts down his bag inside the door to his office and leans against the doorway. “I mean, that too, but that doesn’t mean he’s not still terrifying.”

“So it’s my turn to bribe Brett’s grandma,” Matt says. He shakes his head — then sees an opportunity, and dives in before he can process how bad an idea it is. “Fine. You’re lucky I love you.”

Foggy’s pulse accelerates for precisely five pumps of his heart before it returns to a resting rate. “I knew my charm would pay off some day,” he says easily. 

So they have a potential new client, courtesy of nebulously legal relationships cultivated with certain police officers, but Matt’s out sixty dollars and still not sure what he’s going to do about Foggy.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he confesses to Karen one evening — Foggy went home for dinner, and she’s helping him sort through their remaining photographs, so at first she thinks he’s talking about the evidence. 

“Me neither,” she says. “But we’re smart; I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”

~~*~~*~~

In June, they discover that against all odds, they have now been in business for an entire year. Matt and Foggy both declare this cause for celebration; and so one Saturday, a year after opening, Nelson & Murdock, Attorneys at Law holds a dinner to celebrate successfully avoiding bankruptcy for a full three hundred and sixty five days. That evening finds Matt standing with Foggy in his apartment instead. Matt has already tried to offer him coffee three times; Foggy eventually tells him to just go change, Foggy can find things by himself, unless he wants to go out to dinner in boxers and a ratty t-shirt.

Matt admits he has a point. He strips off his shirt and throws it at Foggy on the way into his room to put on a suit. Foggy reacts with a startled jump; Matt remembers too late that Foggy hasn’t yet seen the healed scars from Nobu’s blades. He dresses quickly and wanders back into the living room.

“How do I look?” he asks.

Foggy walks over and holds him at arm’s length. “Damn good. You know — for you,” he adds, a beat too late, but he doesn’t seem too worried about it. He runs his hands over Matt’s shirt, fixing his collar and smoothing over the lines of his tie even though Matt is almost sure that it was in place already. 

He hides his hyperawareness of the touch with a smile. “Wish I could say the same. You look exactly like a duck.”

“A duck. Out of everything you could have used to insult me, you picked a duck?”

Matt shrugs. “First thing that came to mind.”

Foggy snorts. “You know what, fine.” One hand drops from Matt’s shoulder; Matt has half a second’s warning before Foggy grabs his hand, and another moment to register Foggy’s anticipation before he brings Matt’s hand up towards his own face.

“Um,” says Matt, and freezes with his hand close enough to Foggy’s face to trap his body heat between their skin.

“Seriously,” says Foggy, “tell me how I look.”

“You want an actual answer?” Matt asks.

“Yeah, why not?” says Foggy, casually, even though Matt can _feel_ the heat rising from his neck up to his cheeks. “Been a while.”

Matt can’t think of a clever response; it would probably take an alien horde descending from the sky to drag his attention away from the warm broad figure in front of him long enough to think. He moves closer and slides his fingertips up the side of Foggy’s face along his hairline, lifting his other hand so that his forefingers meet at the highest point of his skull. He traces a broad forehead down to heavy brow ridges, sweeps his thumbs over Foggy’s eyebrows with his fingers to his temples, and traces the fleshy contours of his cheeks back to the bridge of his nose. Matt can just make out the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, so fine that he doesn’t know if Foggy has even noticed them yet. He catalogs this new detail with a nonsensical spark of delight, pausing before touching his forehead with two fingers and running them slowly down his profile: the asymmetrical line of his nose, the small dent in the cartilage before the curve at the end, and — rushing a little to make it less awkward, left hand cupping the side of his face — Matt traces the soft outlines of his mouth, fingers warmed by his breath. Matt drags his hand down to explore the stubble-covered shape of Foggy’s chin, shutting out everything else in favor of committing his face to memory.

Finally, he lets his hands rest on either side of Foggy’s face, thumbs on the soft stretch of skin in front of his ears and palms on the sides of his neck. The quick, even _ba_ -bum, _ba_ -bum of his pulse at the heel of Matt’s palms is soothing. 

“So that was more intense than I was expecting,” says Foggy after a moment. His voice vibrates against Matt’s palms.

“Sorry, I think.” Matt doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe. He sees Foggy all the time, touches him for guidance and for reassurance and, lately, just because he wants to and it’s allowed; but he can’t recall another time when Foggy has asked to be seen and studied. It feels uncharacteristically intimate of him. Matt remembers pulling him up off the mat of the boxing ring and feels a tug in his chest.

“It kind of feels like you’re going to kiss me now,” Foggy says.

“Oh,” says Matt. “Do you want me to?” he asks, lightheaded as the words leave his mouth. He’s armed with a smile, ready to laugh off the fact that he’s been cradling his friend’s face for about three seconds too long — just in case, in spite of everything, he’s wrong about this.

He can hear Foggy lick his lips. “Little bit,” he says, voice creaking upwards. He shifts closer, as if he’s afraid that Matt will think he’s joking.

All things considered, it’s pretty adorable. Matt curls his fingers into Foggy’s neatly combed hair and pulls him in before he can think too hard about what he’s doing. He intends to make it quick — not a big deal, just enough to ease the tension and let him breathe again — right up to the point when he feels an arm around his shoulders and a hand on his neck, keeping him close without putting pressure on any cuts or bruises. The angle makes it a little hard to breathe, but Foggy is holding onto him, kissing him back like this was in the plan all along, and he feels — he feels _loved_. It makes him want to jump off a fire escape or take on a whole crime syndicate with nothing but his fists and the warmth of his best friend touching his shoulders, his chest, his mouth.

Matt leans into him for another second before he makes himself step back. “Okay,” he says. Deep breath. He runs his hands over Foggy’s head, making sure his hair is back in place as best as he can. He feels, surprisingly, more settled now than he did thirty seconds ago — before he got to _kiss Foggy_ , who is funny and charming and caring and apparently happy to kiss him back.

“Okay?” Foggy repeats. “I mean, yeah. Okay. Obviously.”

Matt claps Foggy on the shoulder and ducks away.

“We’re going to talk about that, right?” Foggy says to him.

“Talk about what?” Matt asks, trying to tone down the grin on his face to acceptable levels before he opens the door. “Let’s go, we’ll be late.”

~~*~~*~~

Matt and Foggy meet Karen at the restaurant — a real restaurant that Karen found, not just one of their usual diners. Karen jingles at the wrist and ears and smells like Matt’s favorite of her hair products, clean with more watermelon than other chemical scents. At his side, he can tell when Foggy spots her: his heart jumps. Karen greets Foggy with a kiss on the cheek; when she turns to do the same to Matt, he tries to figure out some way to communicate to her that he has News, but she just takes his arm and walks them inside.

“This place is at least five times nicer than our usual gig,” Foggy tells Matt on their way in. “For one, they take reservations. They’ve got real candles on the tables, and you can probably hear the lack of a TV at the bar. Stairs now, six of ‘em.”

Matt can not only hear the lack of TV and smell the smoke from the candles; he can tell that the floors have been cleaned more recently and more thoroughly than most, and the clientele have different accents; but it’s comfortable and familiar to hear Foggy’s take on it. “What’s on the walls?” he asks. “It sounds … muffled.”

“Some kind of wallpaper, maybe it’s fuzzy. You can figure it out when we sit down.”

“Loads of old photos,” Karen adds. “It’s supposed to be Victorian-themed, I think.”

The hostess stops at a table in a corner between the wall, and what sounds like another set of stairs from the thump-echo of the footsteps. Karen promptly wedges herself safely into the corner. Foggy pulls out Matt’s chair for him with a mock bow while Matt leans his cane against the wall (it is indeed flocked with swirling patterns that Matt traces briefly before sitting). 

They order and eat in comfortable quiet, talking intermittently about the food, about Foggy’s family, Mrs. Urich, and the conversation Matt overhears a few tables over about a television show that Foggy and Karen both like, and that Matt has never heard of. “Don’t shoot the messenger,” he says, “I’m just telling you what, um, what did we decide her name was again? Matilda, what she thinks about Susan.”

“ _Sharon_ ,” Foggy and Karen correct him together, and he grins. 

It’s almost perfect; if not for the restless bouncing of Foggy’s knee against his own for most of the meal, Matt would probably find himself hard-pressed to stay awake. During a lull in the conversation, he lets his hand drop below the table to rest lightly on Foggy’s leg. _You okay_ , he taps.

Foggy falters, fork clattering against the plate. He grabs Matt’s hand and squeezes. Karen kicks Matt’s ankle. At this rate, they should all just sit under the table to talk.

“We should get champagne,” Foggy suggests. He lets go of Matt’s hand. “For toasting.”

“We already have wine, and I’m not going to church hungover,” Matt says.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Foggy says cheerfully.

“Yeah, that was in college,” Matt protests.

Karen coughs. “Were we supposed to prepare speeches? ‘Cause I’ve got nothing.”

“Nah, Foggy just wants to impress us with his rhetorical skill,” Matt says. “Go ahead, what the hell.”

When the champagne arrives, Foggy taps his glass with the knife, as though addressing the whole room instead of two people who are already paying attention to him. “Thank you all for coming,” he says. “I know you have busy schedules, but let’s take a minute to think about where we were a year ago.”

Karen raises her hand.

“Yes?”

“I’d rather not,” she says.

Foggy considers her request for a moment, then squares his shoulders. “Fair enough, you’re excused. Matt. You remember, right? They said we were crazy for quitting Landman and Zachs to go into business together. They promised us we’d regret it. And we did.” Matt raises his eyebrows. “Okay, I did, because I value financial security. But here we are — thank you very much to our honorary third partner, without whom we would probably be dead, and definitely would be out of business. Also, most of our old bosses are facing felony charges right now, so as much as I bitched about it, I don’t actually regret it. I’m proud of us.” He takes Matt’s wrist and raises it, champagne in hand, so that they can all clink their glasses together — an obnoxious gesture that Matt only allows because it’s funny now that Foggy knows he could steal their glasses and hit a moving target with them if he wanted. The cold of the champagne meets the heat in his chest and fizzes pleasantly.

The speech are all Foggy, clear and stirring, and if Matt didn’t know him so well, he might have missed the trembling undercurrent to his voice. Karen picks up on it too, judging by the way she leans forward on her elbows to face him as she sets her glass down. Foggy is fidgeting in his seat again, too, so it doesn’t come as a surprise when he swallows a large gulp of champagne and says in a less bombastic tone, “And, not to detract from the occasion, but I kind of think I should tell you guys something, too.”

Foggy stills as the words leave his mouth; the bouncing has been replaced by a nearly imperceptible shiver in his spine that Matt might not have felt if the whole of his attention wasn’t so singularly focused on the man at his right. Karen’s breathing comes a bit faster. “Well, it can’t be worse than mine,” she says.

“I never told you why Marci dumped me,” says Foggy. “I mean, really.”

The easy atmosphere vanishes from their table, mired in nerves as they are. “I assumed it was because she met Boo Boo Bunny,” Matt says.

It’s unexpected enough to temporarily stop Foggy’s shaking. “What? No, Boo Boo Bunny lives in the spare room at my parents’ house, and if you tell Marci about him, I’m divorcing your ass and starting my own law firm.”

“I thought it was because you weren’t on the same page about your relationship,” Karen says. “Although, are you talking about that cute green rabbit on the bed when I stayed over for Christmas?”

“Okay, both of you shut up, I’m trying to have a moment.” Foggy spreads his hands flat on the table.

“Sorry, Mr. Nelson,” says Matt. Karen sits back in her chair.

“Thank you. So, Marci. I didn’t tell her about my stupid stuffed rabbit, I told her about you. How I had …. feelings … about you.”

Matt knows that it’s coming, he’d be an idiot not to, but his heart still feels like it’s dropped straight out of his chest. There is, apparently, a wide gap between talking it over with Karen and the reality of hearing the words in Foggy’s voice.

Although the words bounce off the ceramic of his plate, rather than being directed at either of them in particular. “When you say ‘you’…” Matt says.

“Come on, you’re telling me you can’t tell?”

Matt licks his lips. “Your heartbeat, flush responses, and nervous tics are consistent with you having feelings about — me. And you did ask me to kiss you an hour ago. That was a pretty big hint.” Karen snorts. And here comes the tricky part, the problem he can’t punch or blackmail his way through. “And you show similar reactions around Karen.”

“Okay, so you do know about that.” Foggy sighs.

“We… actually talked about it , a while ago,” says Karen.

Matt can smell the adrenaline rush, even as all the air goes out of Foggy: he slumps back into his chair and picks up his wine glass with a limp hand. “Of course you did.”

Karen reaches out to touch his arm. 

He pulls it back, skin squeaking against the waxed wooden table in his haste. “Listen. I like where we are now. I like this — I say, indicating the three of us sitting together, _not_ being weird because we’ve just confirmed that Foggy Nelson has a crush on his business partner _and_ his secretary.”

“We talked because we hoped you did, too,” Matt spits out, before Foggy can sink further into his chair. “We talked because … it’s okay. I want you, but I don’t want you just for myself. It’s good. You’re good.” He stops before he can start babbling. “Please.”

Foggy doesn’t straighten up, and his whole head is as hot as it’s ever been, but he stops actively trying to become one with his chair. Matt zeroes in on the twitch of his hand against the edge of the table and grabs it, threads their fingers together.

“Okay, we’re really doing this,” Foggy says, sounding stunned.

“If you want,” says Karen.

“This isn’t how I’d pictured this conversation going,” says Foggy. “In my head, I told you, and it was awkward because I’d been misinterpreting all the signals, and now we have to keep working together while I try to move on.”

“Come on, really?” Matt shakes their clasped hands. “That’s unusually pessimistic of you.”

He waits with a half-cocked grin while Foggy gets flustered all over again, and Karen takes Foggy’s other hand. The wait is rewarded by a short, confused laugh. “You know when you brought in flowers? I kind of hoped there was something going on with you guys, too, and we could all do things together.”

Karen giggles. “’Things’?” 

“You know, dating things,” Foggy elaborates unhelpfully. He pulls his hands away; Matt wipes his now-sweaty palms on his napkin.

“You wanted to join us for threesomes?” Matt asks. Someone at the table behind them turns their head. Karen chokes, or coughs, it’s hard to tell. Matt takes a sip of his wine and smiles.

“I’m not going to answer that,” Foggy says, perspiration forming on his upper lip and temples.

“That’s not a real answer,” Matt argues. “The jury thinks your argument is flawed.”

“You were totally just going to pine and be our third wheel,” says Karen. Her pulse is erratic with nerves, but her laughter is clear and delighted.

“Not only for threesomes! I’m not _that_ shallow,” Foggy says.

“There’s nothing going on between us,” Matt tells him. “Not … like that, anyway. No third wheels.”

Foggy’s hands clench and loosen. He wipes them on his pants. “So you’re not together, but you’ve talked about dating me. Together.”

Karen touches his wrist, so lightly that Matt nearly misses it. “That’s right.”

“Sorry, I’m having a hard time believing it. I know you’re not lying, but it feels a little French indie film, doesn’t it?”

“What do you know about French indie films?” she asks. “I can tell you that as a lawyer, you’re probably not going to be the main character in one. Sorry.” That makes Foggy laugh. Matt has no idea what they’re talking about, and keeps a polite smile on his face until they get back to the part where Foggy might want a relationship with him. Them.

Foggy sits up in his chair, shirt fabric shifting as he moves. “So, I guess,” he starts … and is interrupted by the brisk, rubber-soled footsteps of a waiter. Their plates are lifted from the table and laid on the man’s arm. Foggy taps his foot against the table again. Matt bumps their knees together, hoping to convey his equal dissatisfaction with the interruption.

“Will you be staying for dessert?” asks the waiter.

Foggy and Karen mouth a series of indecipherable, semi-formed words at each other. “Sure. We’ve earned it,” Foggy says.

The whole transaction — handout out menus, Foggy reading them out, and ordering — takes maybe a minute and a half, two minutes, and all Matt wants is to get up and grab Foggy and hold him there in front of God and the Blessed Mother and everyone. He could hold him, and Karen could kiss him, and he would believe them without reservation and they could move on.

The waiter leaves, at last, and Karen breathes a sigh of relief. Matt nods.

“So hypothetically, if anything happens here, it’s going to be me and Karen, and me and Matt. And you guys are okay with this.”

“More than okay,” Matt says. “I want that.”

Karen shrugs. “I like Matt, and I like you, and you two together are a good thing, and being with you makes me happy.”

“Okay, then.” Foggy resettles himself for the third time in as many minutes. “I have officially gone crazy with you, well done. I want to kiss you both, but I can see several small children and old people, so I’m going to ask for a raincheck. Don’t want to gross anyone out.” His face is hot, his speech getting faster as he approaches the end of his sentence.

Matt beams at him. He takes Foggy hand again, lifting it to kiss his knuckles. Across the table, Karen scoots her chair over and presses her lips to Foggy’s cheek. They are all of them running flushed and fluttery and high on adrenaline, and Matt can’t remember the last time that he felt this uncomplicatedly happy. “Shall we find somewhere more private after this?” he asks, pitching his voice exaggeratedly low and … well … he tries for sultry, anyway. God only knows if it worked, and he hasn’t done a whole lot for God lately.

Foggy laughs, so Matt's guessing that was a swing and a miss, but a good one. “I vote yes,” he says.

“We should probably talk about this more,” Karen says, “…but maybe not right now.” 

“Agreed,” says Matt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a short-ish scene where Matt gets overpowered and tied up. Nothing long-term bad happens to him except a blow to his ego, but it made me slightly uncomfortable writing it so I figured it's better to warn than not.


	3. Epilogue

The soundscape of Hell’s Kitchen is vast and variegated well into the night: subways running below the street and busses running over them, cars braking and honking and releasing fumes; people run or shout, or jingle coins in plastic cups, or stumble out of bars. A motorcyclist roars up 10th Avenue with the radio playing from a tinny set of speakers. Matt inhales sewage, subway exhaust, dog shit, vomit, perfume, rubber, and pizza as a group of people pass underneath his perch. Someone lights up a joint a few floors below him and laughs.

It’s quiet, finally. Not for more than a few hours, maybe not more than thirty minutes, but just long enough for Matt to be satisfied with his work. He rotates his arms and stretches, catalogues the future bruises from the night’s work before he takes a running leap from this building to the next, back home.

He changes out of the suit and into softer, more comfortable clothing. He brushes his teeth, shoves some pants for tomorrow into a backpack, and pulls on one of his old black masks. Then he climbs back out the fire escape.

Foggy’s apartment building is a ten-minute taxi ride, a twenty-minute run. Matt spends most of the run conjuring up doomsday prophecies: he’ll get there and Foggy won’t be there even though they talked this evening; he’ll arrive and Foggy will have changed his mind completely. _I can’t do this, Matt, it’s too complicated_. Or, conversely, _I need you to stop, I just want you here_.

 _Have mercy_ , Matt thinks, and shakes his head. He swings down the fire escape, picks the lock on the kitchen window, and slips inside. He has to contort himself a bit to avoid the dishes piled up in the sink, still smelling like two separate orders of cheap Indian food, but he avoids getting anything on himself.

It’s late, now. He can hear two regular, even heartbeats in the next room over. Matt proceeds with only minor hesitation to the grubby Craigslist couch past the kitchenette. He pulls off the bottom cushions — dislodging half a dozen coins and crumbs from at least three past sandwiches in the process — and tucks the cushions under one arm.

There’s a trick to opening Foggy’s bedroom door to keep it from making a godawful screeching noise. It involves lifting the handle and showing the whole door up towards the top right corner of the frame. Despite Matt’s care in manipulating it just so, it still groans in short bursts as he turns around to close it. He freezes, unease and guilt gripping him, and waits. Foggy is sprawled on his back like a starfish across most of the mattress, snoring every few breaths. Karen is a straight line at the edge of the bed. She shifts and sighs. A soft brush of skin on skin, and a bright point of heat tells Matt that she has Foggy’s arm crushed against her chest, trapped there by her hands

After ten seconds, neither of them have moved again. Matt leaves the bag and mask by the door, and lays the couch cushions down end to end on the floor next to Foggy’s side of the bed. With three adults in a queen-sized bed, he’s probably going to wind up on the floor in short ord; might as well make the landing more comfortable. 

He lifts the corner of the sheet and slides under. As he does, Foggy snorts irregularly. He moves against the sheets. “Hey,” he mumbles, voice slurred by sleep.

“Sorry,” Matt says softly. He lies back, groping for a pillow.

“You okay?” Foggy asks.

“Just bruises,” he promises.

“Good.” Foggy tries to pull him closer, despite the summer heat. There’s no force behind it, but Matt obliges him anyway, shoving his face into Foggy’s neck and jaw, smiling against skin salty with sweat. Foggy smells the same as he has for years, but Matt can now confirm it personally. He licks Foggy’s neck, just to be sure, startling a laugh out of him.

“You’re disgusting,” Foggy says without any heat.

Matt grins with delight. He runs a hand up Foggy’s shoulder to his chin to guide himself. Foggy’s breath is terrible, even with toothpaste; Matt kisses the corner of his mouth and drops his head down onto the bedspread beside him, because he can _do_ that now.

He hears movement, but it doesn’t really register until a hand, more slender than Foggy’s, lands on his head and pats him.

“Shh. Sleep now,” Karen commands, with all the sleepy confidence of someone who won’t remember the incident in the morning.

“All right,” Matt says. He lifts her hand off his head and puts it on Foggy’s chest. She grunts and pulls back to her own corner, apparently fully asleep again.

Matt rolls over so he can brace his back against Foggy’s side and rearranges his arm so Matt can use it as a pillow. Sleep comes easier this way, he’s discovered. He tries to pray before he goes to sleep when he stays at Foggy’s, with the vague idea that he owes God for this one. Tonight, he only gets about halfway through before he loses focus, too pleased by the solid heat at his back and the slower heartbeat he can feel in his bones. He hits himself in the temple to keep himself awake, at least long enough to finish. If this is what God wanted for him — to love and be loved by an honest man, to make happy the two people who are his family — then Matt should probably pray a lot more, and more often. If it isn’t …. 

… well, then Matt has no idea how someone with the devil in him ended up this blessed.


End file.
